


What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have

by flashindie



Category: Good Girls (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Pirate, F/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:33:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 42,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26249488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flashindie/pseuds/flashindie
Summary: It thunders in the night, lapping at the docks, making the wood of the ships atop its surface wheeze and creak. But no, that’s imagined, she thinks. She couldn’t hear the ships from here, couldn’t know the men aboard them, but in her minds eye perhaps she sees them. Not huddled in cabins or in flimsy beds among the steerage. They’ll be in town tonight, re-firming their feet on dry land before they slip their sea legs back on in the morrow.-Hey, look, it's a brio pirate au!
Relationships: Beth Boland/Dean Boland, Beth Boland/Rio, Ruby Hill/Stan Hill
Comments: 73
Kudos: 364





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Sarah Blasko album of the same name.
> 
> Huge thank you to a lot of people on this one! It's ended up a bit of a monster! Special thank yous go especially to foxmagpie for bouncing around ideas, and to her, s_t_c_s, ms_scarlet and lunafeather simply for their enthusiasm when I've blogged about this monster, because without that enthusiasm, this probably would've stayed a fun idea / story world I thought about while commuting, and never made it to the page at all.
> 
> [For those interested, there's a visual reference post for this chapter here too!](https://pynkhues.tumblr.com/post/628099386996654080/chapter-1-coming-v-soon)
> 
> Anyway, strap yourselves in for an epic slow burn, everyone, haha. Yearning starts in 5, 4, 3, 2 - -

Lady Elizabeth Boland is of half a mind to retire to her chambers, despite the early hour, when she notices her grandmother’s vase is missing from the buffet in the receiving hall.

It’s enough to make her pause, tilt her head to the side, her hand dropping to her waist as she walks towards the thing, letting her gaze cover every conspicuous inch of it. She takes in the lace runner and the baluster brass candle sticks, the curved crystal regulator clock and the pink glass oil lamp bottle, but alas.

Not so much as a fractured shard of her grandmother’s vase.

“Benjamin,” she calls, her eyes fixed still on the buffet, willing any annoyance away. She really shouldn’t distract her sweet nephew from his studies, but the fact of the matter is that this is not an isolated incident.

Two weeks ago, it had been her grandfather’s cufflinks she’d intended for Kenneth, disappeared from the small box of heirlooms in her vanity, and then only the other evening it had been the cradle gifted to her upon the birth of her first daughter from an associate of her lord husband’s. The latter, she hoped at least, would not be missed, for with four children already tucked upstairs in their beds, Beth prayed nightly her _anticipating_ days were over.

“Benja - - !”

A blond head pops out over the bannister above her, and Beth jumps only briefly, dropping her hand to her chest.

“Oh, there you are! You startled me!”

“Sorry, Aunt Beth,” he hums, looking curiously down at her from the second floor. He’s still dressed in his smart little suit from school – a pressed, blue slack with a woollen vest, his brogues neatly polished and sticking out to overhang her through the bannister rails. “Are you okay?”

Making a small noise of affirmation, Beth gestures with her free hand to the buffet in front of her, hoping Benjamin can see well enough from above.

“Your great grandmother’s vase is gone. You wouldn’t happen to know if Kenneth or Daniel had anything to do with it, would you?”

“Are you asking me to inform on my cousins, aunty?” Benjamin asks with a grin, and Beth can’t help but smile back, trying to school her look into something a little more innocent.

“Never. I’m simply asking my favourite nephew a question.”

“I’m your only nephew,” he replies wryly, before shrugging up above her. “Besides, if they did, they probably deserve to get away with it. I hadn’t seen either of them before supper. Kenneth was out at Lord Milson’s until then, and Daniel and Miss Emma were practicing the duet they’re performing at your lord husband’s salon next month. I could hear them the whole while, even through the wall.”

Beth turns the thought over in her head. Jane hadn’t been out of her sight the entire afternoon either, so it couldn’t have been her youngest. She bites the inside of her cheek, training her ear just enough she hears the cook maid packing away the crockery in the kitchen, the clip of trotting horses and the gristly roll of carriage wheels on the road outside of here, but no other footsteps above her, nor any hint that her children lay awake and conspiring. She drops her hands to her hips, glancing back up at Benjamin above her. 

“Is your mother home?”

He shakes his head _no_.

“She went out with Mr. Brown a few hours ago. She said they had to pick something up.”

And right, Beth thinks, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. She knows _exactly_ what that means. As if her sister hadn’t disgraced the Marks’ already slighted name enough with having Benjamin out of wedlock (a _bastard_ – the fact of it had practically killed their mother), she insisted on making a mockery of the Boland name too by engaging in such indiscretions beneath Beth’s very own roof.

She huffs out a breath.

“Well, I guess the matter will have to wait until morning, won’t it?”

Benjamin nods in agreement, but waits until Beth’s formal dismissal to disappear back into his bedroom, and well. It’s not long then until Beth’s moving to her own, up the stairs and down the hall, ringing the bell for the maid to attend her in the process.

 _It likely has been broken_ , she thinks. _The vase_.

If not through the children, then through Annie, or perhaps one of the servants. Likely a simple accident – a knock against the buffet, enough to wobble it and leave it shattered against the floor of the receiving hall, but - -

 _The cufflinks_ , she reminds herself.

_And the cradle._

Beth frowns, stepping into her bedroom and sitting down at her dresser. She removes her delicate, gold Etruscan earrings, her treasured pearl necklace, the pins that fasten her hair up in its curls, laying them each gently in the hollow of her jewellery box – the small, carved rosewood chest being one of the few things she’d brought with her when Dean had wed her near twenty years ago. It had been a blessing, that much she’d known even then, or rather, not so much a blessing, but a mutually beneficial _match_.

The Boland’s had been new money after all – Mr. Boland Sr. having thrived in the business of horse carriages, custom designing some of such quality and innovation, he had risen social ranks with unheard of haste, and it hadn’t been long before talk flooded town of the eligibility of his tall, strong and handsome son. He’d had some uncouthness of course, everyone knew that, but the promise was that that could be trained out of him with the right wife, and a good, old family, and - - well.

The Marks’ had been a family in decline, hadn’t they? Their wealth so whittled away by her father’s penchant for gambling and his struggling legal practice that her mother had stopped getting out of bed. Still, they were a family – at the time at least – of strong social standing and dignity. When Mr. Boland Sr. had spotted Beth, still just sixteen, at a soiree at Lady Hazel’s and proposed the match, her father had insisted they could do better, but her mother, bitter even then, had known they couldn’t hope to.

Beth glances down at her gaudy wedding ring, twisting it on her finger, wondering if perhaps she could get away with removing it – if only for an hour or two, when Dorothy appears in her doorway.

“You rang, ma’am?”

Quickly moving her hands, Beth gestures behind her to the back of her navy, silk dress, rising steadily to her feet in the process. Picking up on the cue as she always does, Dorothy crosses the master bedroom – passing the large, four poster bed, soft gold chaise, the ottoman – to Beth’s spot at her dresser, her aging fingers making quick work of unhooking each little eyelet on the back of Beth’s gown.

The cool fall air chills her skin, nipping above her many petticoats before slipping below as Dorothy pulls them off and puts them aside, the stiffer ones and the softer, then the bustle, before finding the laces of her corset and making as quick work as she can. Beth swallows in a rich, full breath as the thing loosens, her ribs singing in gratitude, her waist softening too sweetly as Dorothy finally pulls it off too.

Leaving Beth in just her chemise, stockings, garter and drawers, Dorothy takes a step back, finding Beth’s robe in the closet and draping it over her, before tilting her head, directing her out into the hall.

“We’ve rest the bath in front of the fire, my lady,” Dorothy tells her, and Beth nods. Now that the season has started to chill, it’s best to bathe before the larger fire in the library instead of in her and Dean’s chambers. She allows Dorothy to lead her out, unable to quite help peering into each of the children’s rooms as she passes, catching their little forms curled in each of their little beds, their soft snores and snuffles barely audible over the crackle of the fire in the distance and the slosh of the water the servants are pouring into the tub.

Dorothy closes the door to the library, and Beth sucks in a warm breath, dropping her robe from her shoulders and feeling her nipples pebble beneath the brisk fall air. She slips out of the last of her clothes, and down into the portable tub, exhaling as the languid water engulfs her.

“Will that be all for now?” Dorothy asks, and Beth blinks over at her, the steam through the dark briefly ensnaring the other woman. _She should ask her about the vase_ , Beth thinks, but then perhaps not. She’d asked after the cuff links and the cradle after all, and much more interrogation could lead to unhappiness amongst the staff. Annie had told her stories after all, of other houses, where servants spat in food or dropped hems from dresses, and Dorothy hadn’t seemed to know anything about the other missing items anyway.

But of course, there was the _other_ question.

Beth clutches at the rim of the tub, tilting up her chin as she clears her throat.

“Has Lord Boland sent word of when we might expect him home tonight?”

A pause.

Beth looks, breath caught, and Dorothy wrings her hands.

“No, my lady.”

Beth waves out her own hand, dismissing her.

*

The bed dips, and Beth startles awake, the pungent scent of pipe tobacco and liquor and something painfully sweet assaulting her senses as a large hand paws at her through her nightdress.

“You didn’t wait up.”

A cold nose presses against her neck, and his lips drag, somehow both chapped and wet across her skin.

Familiar.

“Dean, stop it,” she hisses, writhing away from him in the bed, still trying to get a hold of herself, her mind groggy, struggling through the weight of her former slumber.

He’s brought one of the oil lamps to bed with him, rested it on the table at his side, and as her eyes adjust, she can see him, sweaty beside her, unkempt, his blue eyes dilated and his suit in disarray. He looks like he’s been working in the fields, she thinks, reproachful, her lip curling as the wan yellow light from the lamp flickers off his skin.

“I don’t wait up when you don’t send word,” she tells him, sitting up enough to push his hand off her, and Dean’s lips form a hard line as he flops on his back in their bed. He kicks off his muddy boots in the process, letting them fall to the floor with a hard thud, and Beth tries not to imagine the splatter of filth she’ll wake to in the morning.

“Where have you been?” she asks, her voice sharper than she intends. “You said you’d be home for supper.”

Like he’d expected the question (like he hadn’t forgotten he’d said he _would_ be), Dean pointedly avoids her look, shoulders tense at her tone as he wriggles back up the bed beside her.

“I was meeting with some new potential buyers. The Wilson Brothers. You know them. They’re the milliners on Fourth Street - - you bought that - -” he waves a hand at his head, somehow both flippant and accusatory, and Beth can’t help but flush at the implication, her fingers clutching at the sheets. “ _Thing_ there last spring. They want something for their - - I don’t - - I shouldn’t have to bore you with the details.”

With the words, he drops his hand to his belly, rubbing there through the thick wool of his vest. After a moment, his stomach gurgles, and Dean moves wobbly fingers to the buttons of his clothes to free himself. Beth can only watch, her own fingers itching to do it for him, but - - _no_ , she thinks. He never responds well to it after a drink, tends to slap her hands away like Kenneth does with her sometimes. A boy with his mother.

The thought makes her sit up a little straighter in the bed, a stranger thread of frustration and guilt and - - and something else, something tinged blue and aching - - stitching up in her. She looks down at her lap, entangling her fingers there in distraction, before glancing back at Dean. She watches him for another moment, two, gaze tracing him for any sign of what he’s done, where he’s been, whose company he’s kept (but he’s told her that, she thinks. The Wilson Brothers. Wills herself to believe it, even as that too-sweet smell finds her nose again). She swallows thickly.

“Sometimes I would like to be bored with the details.”

Maybe it would make them closer. Knowing all of him. Knowing what he did with his days at the carriage works. Would perhaps permit him to seek out her company, instead of - -

“It’s business,” Dean cuts beside her, slurs a little, interrupting her thoughts. “Good business. Good partnerships, good new deals. My father would have been proud. Mother _will_ be.”

“That’s great,” Beth tries, but Dean keeps going:

“And you want me to be turning that business away? For - -” he gestures a drunken hand around their chambers, and Beth stares at him, her eyes unblinking, her cheeks burning, even before he adds: “ _Supper_?”

The linen below her is almost too smooth, too soft against her legs, but the weight of the blanket on her suddenly, oddly, crushing; the urge to throw it off herself, to free herself of this bed causing her spirit to twitch. She swallows thickly again, tempering every instinct, focusing instead on shaking her head.

“You are not hearing me,” she says firmly, because he’s not, because that’s not what she _meant,_ and Dean scoffs, wriggling back in the bed again as he tries to pull his vest off without sitting up. _He must have the spins_ , she thinks. The good wife in her wishes to call Dorothy for the smelling salts.

(The bad one in her thinks _good_ ).

“I hope I’m not, because what I’m _hearing_ , dear wife, is that you wish me to abandon my work and stay home so that my name can go the way of your father’s.”

And it’s through the open window, that Beth can hear the roar of the sea.

It thunders in the night, lapping at the docks, making the wood of the ships atop its surface wheeze and creak. But no, that’s imagined, she thinks. She couldn’t hear the ships from here, couldn’t know the men aboard them, but in her minds eye perhaps she sees them. Not huddled in cabins or in flimsy beds among the steerage. They’ll be in town tonight, re-firming their feet on dry land before they slip their sea legs back on in the morrow.

Annie will be somewhere with them now.

Laughing beside the mariners, drinking, a dress on that belies her station, but it won’t matter, because she is nameless with them, to them, _like_ them, free among them, at least, she will be until the locals see her. Until the memory of their father’s name re-dresses her and deems her unfit. 

Because their father’s name does still mean something to this town.

Beth’s chest heaves, the blood thunders in her ears as she stares at Dean’s gormless face, his writhing body as he finally manages to pull off his shirt, tossing his clothes carelessly to the floor beside their bed.

“My father’s name - -” she starts, voice taut with anger, but Dean doesn’t let her get another word out. 

“We can’t rest on our laurels like he did. Our daughters aren’t old enough to get us out of binds yet.”

Beth’s mouth slams shut.

Any indignity stripped from her, the shame of it – of the Marks’ downfall, of their _situation_ – swallowing up the fractured remains of her pride, and suddenly, she can’t look at him.

Not at his squirming, flaccid body, and so she turns abruptly to the open window, leaning into the sounds of the sea in the distance as she stares hard out at the night. The gaslights have all been put out now, so the thick blanket of darkness rests across the town. No horses trot, nor carriages travel. No maids bang dust from rugs or cart dresses from laundry houses. No children play.

Vaguely, she thinks she can hear an owl hoot, can hear the heavy flap of wings.

Somewhere, a door opens and bawdy, jovial music slips out.

Maybe that’s where they are. The mariners. Her sister.

She wonders if they’re dancing.

(When was the last time she had danced? When was the last time Dean had asked her to?)

“I apologise,” she says stiffly, still staring out the window. “You’re right, of course. Supper is of far less consequence than your business.”

Dean snorts in agreement, kicking back the blankets so that he can wriggle up beneath them, and Beth turns, watching him move beside her, the soft lines of his pale body disappearing beneath their bed linens. The cut of his words still smart against her battered heart, but they couldn’t cut, she reminds herself, for wounds will get her nothing and nowhere.

 _Ask not, want not, hope not, and he will provide_. That’s what her mother had always told her.

And hadn’t that been what he’d done today after all? Provide for her? For their children? Her mind returns to his day, to the Wilson Brothers, to the carriage stores, and then, before she can help it, her mind chases her own.

To the vase.

Gone from the buffet.

She bites the inside of her cheek.

“I suppose I am just a little shaken,” she adds, gentle this time, her tone playing at apology a little easier now, trying to smooth the night back over. Hoping to explain away her unwifely sharpness with a silly wifely concern. “My grandmother’s vase is missing.”

She’s not entirely sure how she expects Dean to react, how she’d like him to, what she was wanting from telling him, but his shrug is formless, unbothered again, and something in her loosens in relief or disappointment, she can’t be sure.

“One of the children must’ve broken it. I’ll talk to them in the morning.”

He sniffles after he’s spoken, then rubs a hand back over his nose, and Beth just watches him for another minute, perhaps two, before finally nodding, and perhaps that’s easiest of all. She lies down again, rolling back towards the window, and she wills herself not to think a thing, to not dwell, to not let her mind wander downstairs to the vase nor out into the night to her sister’s side, and certainly not to where Dean has been, out til - -

The bed shifts, and suddenly there are wet lips again, pressing softly against her shoulder through the thin cotton of her night dress.

“I’m sorry it’s missing,” Dean whispers, hand coming up to clutch at her hip, then further up to the dip of her waist. “And I’m sorry for speaking so harshly.”

And she really is still trying not to think, to let him paw at her belly, clutch at her breast, to do what her mother taught her – to take what she gets. His other hand tugs at her night dress and Beth thinks _don’t think,_ but there’s that smell again – reeking from his every pore, and she just - - can’t _help herself_.

“Is there perhaps a Wilson sister?” she asks quietly, as gentle as she can manage, and Dean’s hand pauses in its ministrations.

“What? No.”

“Then I suppose it is one of the brothers who wears a whore’s perfume.”

And well.

At least that’s enough to make him stop pawing at her.

*

“They’re like a little stocking, only instead of wool or linen or silk with cotton, they’re made out of lambskin, and instead of going on your legs, they go on his - - ” 

“ _Annie_!”

Beth’s eyes dart across the swell of people all around them, desperately checking to ensure nobody’s heard, and she’s left to thank whatever good fortune she has left, because her sister’s voice, her impolite words, don’t seem to have penetrated the louder bustle of the market. She huffs out a breath, clutching the handle on her basket to her waist as she spins to face Annie, her cheeks furiously flushed.

Before she can so much as open her mouth to reply though, Annie cuts her off.

“They’re called condoms,” she says, having the decency at the very least to lower her voice, and Beth lets her eyes slip briefly shut, feeling the flush spread to the shells of her ears. “They stop you - - _you know_.”

And of course, _that’s_ the thing she can’t say.

Beth rolls her eyes, picking up her step as she navigates the crowd.

The dockland markets really are one of Beth’s favourites. There’s something about watching the ships bob on the water, the mariners back to their boats after their night on dry land – strong, sunburnt men carrying off heavy loads of fur and leather, silk and wood – that calms her. She can see a square-jawed man from here carting off large tins of coffee, dropping them at the pier where men in tired suits call out prices in gold coins and Spanish dollars, competing with the stores of men across the way on firmer land with their slabs of silver scaled fish and live pinching crabs.

The smell of saltwater taps at her nose, and she inhales deeply, feeling the knot between her shoulders loosen, even as Annie shifts her weight, stepping her sandy boots back up to match Beth’s stride.

“All I mean is that if you had Dean use them, you wouldn’t have to worry so much anymore.”

Annie’s voice is thick with sympathy now, with the sort of nervous, delicate energy Beth’s come to expect from her when it comes to matters like this, and the thing is, she knows Annie means well.

Knows her sister knows how much Beth had struggled with her second last pregnancy, how much the last had nearly killed her. How Jane had twisted up inside her at an impossible angle that had the doctor’s mouth settled thin and both Annie and Dean’s faces ashen. It hadn’t just been the expecting days though, nor the birth. The months after had left Beth feeling - -

Well.

That was rather the point of it all, wasn’t it?

She hadn’t felt a thing at all for too long.

Beth clears her throat, letting her gaze linger on Annie’s, taking in her sister’s dark eyes, her soft, pink cheeks, her blonde hair twisted back off her face and braided into a knot. She’s dressed in a tartan day dress – as she often is – a brown, white and blue plaid with a bright lace trim and a midline of polished white buttons. It’s youthful in the way Beth has come to expect of Annie, despite her being a mother herself, and Beth clutches her basket a little tighter to her waist, feeling the confines of her own trim, pale blue dress, buttoned to the middle of her neck, the pagoda sleeves the only release.

The memory of last night finds her too quickly, of Dean rolling away from her, insulted enough to stew in silence, imagining his distance a punishment while Beth had felt only relief, but then that had come with its own fresh bloom of guilt. She can’t do much for that right now beyond what it is she’s doing, but still, she thinks, gaze finding Annie again. She can do something for her sister at least.

She sighs.

“You don’t have to worry about me suddenly anticipating again,” Beth says quietly. “Dean and I aren’t keeping company so much these days.”

The admission burns at her throat, at her cheeks, and embarrassment twists at her chest when she sees Annie’s eyes widen in surprise, sees her mouth open and close, gawping like a fish, and god, perhaps Annie’s comfort wasn’t worth Beth’s. She picks up her step again, eyes fixed ahead at where the gulls swoop, catching fish off the stall troughs, making sellers yell, throw up their fists, while women clutching babes to their breasts push out wood-slatted buckets of rough-skinned potatoes onto the street.

“He’s been very busy,” Beth adds quickly, blinking and it’s so sudden again, the memory of last night, but the light of day has only withered away any relief and allowed that guilt to pollinate.

He’d been better this morning after all. Had even spoken to the children about the vase, earnest in voice and not unkind. The liquor free of his system, he had approached something decent again, and before he’d left, he’d clutched her hand, promising to be home tonight, at least, for supper.

She had been so quick to judge, to refuse him in their marriage bed, and for what? Missing a meal? Smelling of another woman? Who could’ve been anyone, of course. Another man’s wife, leaning in too close, a maid, any woman bumped into and forgotten.

He had made their house, kept her and their children clothed and fed. Kept her _sister,_ her _nephew_ clothed and fed. And how had she repaid him?

By insulting him and then refusing him? Worse, accusing him of breaking vows?

Beth inhales sharply, tasting the docklands air – the sea and the dirt and the trout, oysters, mackerel. Her gaze skirts back to Annie.

Maybe the - - _Annie’s suggestion_ wasn’t such a bad idea.

But then, how would Dean respond? To knowing she wanted to bear him no more children than she had?

She shakes her head.

“I’m baking a mahogany cake for him this afternoon,” Beth says instead, and Annie makes no secret of rolling her eyes. Which is not wholly unfair, Beth thinks, but still. She raises a hand to toy with her necklace, fingering the pearls, feeling the smoothness of them there. A treasured gift from Dean, years ago, when she’d told him how much she liked living near the water.

He really does love a mahogany cake.

“You will be able to have a slice too,” Beth placates, when Annie’s silence offers little else. “And Benjamin, of course.”

A strange look crosses Annie’s face then, but she just picks up her step again, striding just slightly ahead of Beth, leaving her to watch the plaid hem drag slightly through the dirty floor of the dock. Annie’s always been reluctant to let Beth tailor the thing or hem it, has been to let Beth offer any care to her since her permanent visit to the Boland Estate with a swollen belly protruding beneath her dress. Beth sighs, striding easily forwards to match her sister’s shorter step.

For a while, it’s easy to let the market simply lead them where it wants them. Beth picks up drinking chocolate, a tin of coffee, some patches of cotton to mend Kenny’s trousers and one of Jane’s dresses. She’s sure Dorothy has flour at home, eggs, butter, sugar and vinegar, but Beth finds long pods of vanilla at one of the ship stalls, and she’s still parcelling it into her basket, Annie beside her eyeing off a display of bullet moulds she has absolutely no use for, when a voice cuts through the crowd behind them.

“Lady Boland!”

Jerking her head up, Beth blinks as she sees Governor Turner stride across the street towards them. He’s dressed sharply (always is), in a pair of long black boots and spotless trousers. Beneath a sleek black tailcoat, he bears a fitted vest, a stylised white shirt with a fine white cravat. The look in all brings out the handsome lines of his face and his large, dark, engrossing eyes that remind Beth strangely of a lynx.

“Governor,” she replies, tilting her head in his direction in greeting as opposed to invitation, although he seems to take it up as the latter, quickening his stride towards them. Internally, Beth sighs as Annie huffs, stepping a little sideways in the hopes not to be seen.

“What a pleasure to see you grace the streets of our fine city,” he says when he gets to them, his expression bright even as the cut of his mouth looks sharp, and Beth shifts her weight, tries to ease the tension pulling in her chest when she sees his gaze slide sideways to Annie. “Oh, and with Miss Marks too, I see.”

“Lady Marks,” Beth corrects curtly, and the Governor just hums.

“Of course. _Lady_ Marks.”

He bows his head slightly in put-on apology towards Annie, and Beth doesn’t even have to look at her sister to know she’s burning with humiliation beneath the blue lace trim of her dress. It’s enough to make Beth square her jaw, something biting low in her at the Governor’s deliberate mistitling, but before she can say a thing, he steps slightly sideways, revealing a wiry, younger man. Pale, with small, brown eyes and thin lips, a head of gingery-brown hair, and if there was something lynx-like about Governor Turner, there was something decidedly squirrelly about this man, or - - not squirrelly, Beth thinks, pursing her lips and holding her basket back towards her waist.

Weaselly.

“I believe your lady sister knows my new deputy, Lord Huntington, but I’m not sure if you’ve made his acquaintance yourself, Lady Boland?”

Beth’s gaze does dart back to Annie at that, seeing her sister’s face flush as she avoids Lord Huntington and Governor Turner’s looks – the former uncertain, twisting a gold ring on his thumb, the latter amused – and well, Beth thinks, pushing her basket to one arm, and bending her knee into the slightest curtsey she can manage.

“Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” she offers demurely, and Lord Huntington bows his head deeply.

“And yours. Your husband equips the city with its carriages, is that right?”

“He does.”

“Well, then my pleasure doubles. I’ve only recently moved from Virginia and I can tell you I have never had a smoother travel than the ones I’ve had in your husband’s vehicles.”

“I will have to tell him.”

“Oh please do,” Turner says suddenly, interjecting, and Beth blinks at him, surprised at the slight layer of glee in his tone. “In fact, I’d be grateful if you could pass along my greetings too. Tell him I hope to be seeing him again. It’s been - - _too long_.”

Beside her, she can feel Annie shift her weight, can feel the stranger bubble of tension in her throat as she lowers her head in concession. Beth finds her gaze though sticking on Lord Huntington, who’s still toying with the gold ring on his thumb.

Turner claps his hands together.

“We better be on our way. Lady Boland, Miss Marks.”

Before she can correct him again, Governor Turner strides back out across the crowd, Lord Huntington on his heels, turning around only briefly to stare back at Annie, and Beth shifts forwards, just enough to block her sister from his view, to stare back at him in her place. Lord Huntington jerks his head around, scurrying off after Turner, and Beth pauses, twisting back to look at her sister.

“Let’s finish up,” she says quietly. “I think we better return to the house.”

*

“You went to bed with him.”

It’s not a question, and Annie frowns in response, her hands still wiping down one of the large mixing bowls they’d used to make the mahogany cake for Dean. They’d started on it promptly after arriving back at the house, a necessary distraction from the strangeness of Governor Turner’s tone and the look on Lord Huntington’s squirreled face, and perhaps the thought had stewed as they’d whisked eggs and folded batter. Of exactly how much pleasure the Governor took in the decline of the Marks name. Of how much pleasure he took knowing his deputy – new to town – could dishonour her sister so.

Beth flushes even at the thought, her fingers twitching in anger for the governor, for Annie for putting them in this position at all, but swallows the feeling as best she can. Her gaze settles back on her sister, waiting for her to reply, and it takes a moment, two, but finally, Annie folds.

“We were seeing one another,” she says, her voice raw and thick. “It wasn’t - - _so_ improper. He had seemed genuine, spoke of wanting to marry me, but. He wasn’t. Isn’t. Didn’t.”

And it’s enough to make Beth pause, to stare at her sister, take in the tremble of her face, the deepening lines of it, the way she clings to the facade, tries to hold it, keep it together for Beth. All the ways she can’t. Beth sighs, looks away, down at the heavy black cast iron oven, the long wooden floors, spots a little scuff mark and wonders if it’s her shoe or Annie’s, Dorothy’s or the cook maid’s.

“How’d you even meet him?”

And then it’s Annie’s turn to sigh.

“You remember I went to that shooting contest last month? Mr. Brown took me. Noa - - _Lord Huntington_ was competing. I didn’t know he’d been offered the deputyship with the Governor. I thought he was just new in town. We just. Liked each other’s company, I guess.”

The rich smell of the chocolate and brown sugar and butter permeates the kitchen as the mahogany cake starts to rise in the oven. The scent something welcoming as Beth turns over Annie’s words, her mind running through the scenarios of Lord Huntington’s seeming courtship, of Annie’s care and clear feelings, and she presses her lips together, lets her gaze dart back over to her sister as she tentatively says:

“You said he spoke of an offer? Perhaps - - ”

“He already has a wife.”

Beth’s mouth dries instantly, the heat from the stove suddenly suffocating, and something in her is sealing so fast it’s painful, but then Annie shakes her head.

“I didn’t know. Not before I met her.”

It doesn’t lessen the seal, but it shifts the weight of it. The affront at the affair shifting from both of them, to simply Lord Huntington, and she’d been right, Beth thinks, watching Annie’s face crumble, watching her sister suck in a breath, dash away a tear.

He was a weasel.

Beth looks away, flicker of fury in her burning bright, and she tries to catch it, fist it in her palm and let it burn her skin instead of catching Annie’s. Her mind sifts through the information her sister has given her, pulls apart the dry ingredients of it, thinking of how to spin this, when the word inevitably travels, and she should ask who else knows – clearly the Governor, but how loose are Lord Huntington’s lips? – only what comes out is:

“You used your - - the - - _stockings_?”

Which is enough to make Annie laugh at least, even if there is nothing behind it.

“Yes,” she replies, and Beth can’t help but exhale in relief. It does little to help her anger, to stop it burning through her palms, but it helps something else. The part of Beth that thinks a few well-placed words at Lady Asmita’s next soiree, then a few more at Lady Karen’s can grant Beth control of this narrative. No swelling belly beneath Annie’s corset means hearsay at best, and Lord Huntington having a wife means Beth can ensure he has a vested interest in keeping her sister’s name out of his mouth.

She lets her gaze flick back to Annie, and gestures with her head, taking her out of the kitchens, the dining room, and through to the ladies apartment, a larger room than Dean’s study (for it has far less to hide), and one much more comfortable. A large floral chaise, a gilded mirror, a cabinet of liquor – the ladies apartment was Beth’s favourite room in the house.

And it was too easy – to pour them both a drink.

Behind her, Annie takes a seat on the chaise, her tartan dress billowing around her as she wriggles back into the cushions, her face not so much lined with hurt anymore as it is sagged with exhaustion. If she knew her sister less, Beth would blame it on the late nights out, on the wound of Lord Huntington, but there is only one man who puts that look on her sister’s face.

Before she speaks, Beth adds a second jigger of bourbon to their glasses.

“Since we are speaking of men who would not marry me,” Annie starts, her tone deceptively light as she holds her hand out expectantly for one of the glasses as Beth sits on the chaise beside her. “I got a letter last week from Gregory.”

And well.

At least that much is predictable.

Still, Beth arches an eyebrow as she hands Annie the glass, watching as her sister takes a long, practiced sip, and steels her breath. Gregory – _Lord Rabe_ – was Benjamin’s father. His family had been a friend of the Marks’ for years, and in the happier days of their childhood, there had been talk of a betrothal. Only then the Marks fortune was lost, the shine to their name dulled, and Lady Rabe, Gregory’s mother, had felt the match no longer appropriate.

Only it had been hard, Beth thinks, because so long hearing of a future together, of keeping company with the promise of it, had borne fondness in Annie and in Gregory, and while the betrothal proved easy to redact, those feeling had not.

So they’d tried to elope.

Beth had already been married to Dean at the time, living at the Boland Manor across town, and she’d learnt of it not through her parents, but through the gossip of waiting ladies. Had heard it dripped from tongues like poisoned honey, and Beth had floundered in her ignorance, young and silly enough to pretend to know better, to downplay it in public and worry in private, but it had been no use. Not when the word spread that the young lovers had been found.

Caught even before vows could be exchanged, but not before Annie was with child.

The Rabe’s had refused to claim it – although to his credit, Gregory had tried – and had quickly wed him to another woman of high station, a doctor’s daughter from out west, while Annie had been locked away at the ruined Marks house, meant to have the baby in secret.

Only she hadn’t.

Instead, she’d run again, only this time, she’d gone to Beth.

Beth takes a sip on her bourbon as Annie takes a draining gulp from her own.

“Oh?” Beth asks, playing coy as her eyes stay fixed on her sister, taking in the bob of her throat, the nervous twitch to her fingers, fiddling with the skirts of her dress. When Annie finishes her drink, she slips up off the chaise, striding back towards the bar to pour herself another, and Beth waits, patient with Annie’s reluctance.

“She’s barren,” Annie suddenly tells the bar, and Beth blinks, sitting up a little straighter. “His Lady Rabe. His wife.”

The words hang for a minute, and it’s not as if the thought hadn’t entered her mind over the years. Benjamin was near fifteen after all, and Gregory had wed Nancy while Annie had still been anticipating. Word travelled, rumours caught once again, and Beth had heard Nancy hadn’t helped it, with her tense-set shoulders at drunken soirees and the way her eyes lingered on other people’s children at garden parties and high teas.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Beth says carefully, and Annie pulls the stopper out of the bourbon bottle, pouring more than a jigger.

“They need an heir, and Gregory - - ” she trails off, but Beth sits forwards on the chaise, understanding.

“Already has one.”

Annie just nods, takes another sip of her bourbon.

“He asks my permission to legitimise Benjamin.”

It’s almost too much, Beth thinks. The words too loaded, too steeped in need, in pain, in history and future, and Beth just stares at her sister. Takes in her glassy eyed look, the twist of her hair, still tangled from the sea breeze at the markets, the judder of her throat as she throws back the last of her new glass of bourbon. Beth inhales, and she counts.

One.

Two.

Three.

“That’s good,” she says, as sure as she can manage it, because it _is_. They’ve needed this. Annie and Benjamin couldn’t live sheltered from disgrace at the Boland Manor forever. Benjamin needed the title he was due, and Annie needed it perhaps even more to have any chance of reclaiming a semblance of honour, particularly with men like Lord Huntington around, ready to charm their way beneath her skirt.

Yes, Beth would lose them both from her house (the thought cuts a thread in her, leaves something hanging loose from the bars of her ribs, asunder, and she hides a trembling hand in her skirts), but that wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was Benjamin’s title, and Annie’s security.

A future both of them deserved.

“Is it?”

“Yes,” Beth promises her, standing up to stride towards Annie by the bar, dropping her glass to the top of it to grab Annie’s hand instead. “It will give Benjamin a name again. He’s almost of his majority, and he _loves_ you, and him having the Rabe name will protect you both.”

Annie closes her eyes, tears building at the corners, and there is so much to work out. So much to plan for, to negotiate the terms for Benjamin’s legitimacy, protocol to make Benjamin a Rabe instead of a Marks, but before Beth can even start to work through it in her head, the front door opens with a crack and the unmistakable sound of Dean’s long gait lumbers through the entrance of the house.

And she’s not sure if it’s Annie’s words, the knowledge that Dean’s name had kept them all safe until now, that this would unite the Boland’s and Rabe’s in a way that would please him, or if it’s the simple fact that he has kept his promise today to be home for supper, but something flutters awake in Beth’s belly. Giving Annie’s hand one last squeeze, telling her that all will be right, Beth moves gracefully, leaving Annie in the apartment to recollect herself as she goes down the hall herself to greet her husband.

The patter of small feet sounds above her as the children rush down the stairs, and she hears Dean once more before she rounds the corner and sees him, the delighted tone to his voice audible before the image of him as he scoops up Jane and Emma, hugging them into his chest.

“Something smells good,” he says loudly, and Beth lingers in the arching doorway of the foyer, watching as Dean kisses each child atop the crown of their little heads.

“Mama made cake,” Emma says sweetly, as Danny adds:

“Chocolate cake!”

“Mahogany cake,” Beth corrects, smiling when Dean’s head jerks up to meet hers, and he’s so familiar to her in the moment of it. So _present_ , even when he’s not, and how foolish she’d been. How ungrateful. He grins back, something boyish and sweet, dropping Jane and Emma back to their feet and stepping towards her across the foyer.

“That’s my favourite,” he adds, his voice warm, and Beth’s smile only widens as she stands a little taller, a little prouder. 

“I know. It’s still in the oven, but it’ll be ready before supper. It’ll be like a backwards dinner. Dessert before the main course.”

It’s enough to make the children and Dean cheer happily, and Beth warms again beneath the glow of their delighted faces, and it’s just - - _sudden_ , that’s all. The way Dean leans in, bumping her nose with his as he plants a wet, hard kiss on her mouth.

Beth reels back a little, startled, but pulls herself together enough to kiss back, relieved again when he pulls away without deepening it. She smooths her hands down the belly of her dress.

“Is there an occasion?” he asks, his face so close to hers she can smell the coffee and pipe tobacco on his breath, and Beth shakes her head, resisting the urge to rub at her mouth, to pull the flecks of his saliva from her lips, and she has never particularly enjoyed kissing, that’s all, particularly surprise ones. She swallows, aims for a smile again as Dean drops a hand to her waist, pulling her in a little closer as Dorothy calls the children back upstairs to clean up. “Perhaps I forgot my own birthday?”

“Can a wife not surprise her husband?” she asks lightly, and Dean just laughs.

“Of course, I suppose it’s just been a while.”

Just like that, another knot in the ribbon of her guilt forms, and Beth shakes her head, looking up at him long enough to take in his sweet eyes, his kind features.

“The ingredients are fresh from the market today too,” she says, a distraction, and Dean merely laughs, letting go of her waist to stride back out across the foyer.

“I thought I could smell fish on you.”

He says the words so flippantly, so off-hand, that it takes Beth a moment to hear them.

When she does, she flushes deep with embarrassment, the feeling twisting in her chest, and _foolish_ , she thinks again, her mother’s voice in her head. The memory of the way he’d smelt last night – that perfume lingering on his skin – finds her, and she should’ve made sure to put vanilla behind her ears while she baked. She tugs a little at her silver earring, self-conscious, as Dean grabs the shoehorn from the buffet, removing his heavy boots.

“How was the market anyway?” Dean asks. “I think it’s been months since I went. Did you talk to Peterson about the oysters? He promised us extra free of charge after we got those bad ones the last time, remember.”

She can steal upstairs, she thinks. Put on some perfume.

“I didn’t think to,” she says, mind up in her chambers, on what might cover the smell of fish, and Dean shrugs, toeing into his slippers and tossing his boots below for one of the maids to clean later. “I can go tomorrow though, if you’d like.”

Dean makes a sound of affirmation, and Beth just watches him for a minute, frowning as Dean says something or other about Peterson again, about running into the other man last week at a tavern, and she’s still thinking about the smell of fish, how to cover it from him, when she says, offhand: 

“Actually, I ran into Governor Turner at the markets today myself.”

She intends it glib, vaguely caught with the memory of how he’d asked her to pass along his word while Dean talks about passing something along to Peterson, but she startles when Dean suddenly stops babbling. The silence hangs for a moment, weighs them down, and Beth refocuses on him in time to see his skin turn grey, the colour lost to his usually pink cheeks, his tanned neck. He blinks rapidly at her, and it’s strange, to suddenly have his full attention.

“What?”

“Governor Turner and Lord Huntington, his new deputy, were at the markets,” Beth elaborates, and Dean’s mouth falls open, revealing a row of familiar, crowded teeth.

“What were they doing there?”

And it’s Beth’s turn to blink then, head jerking slightly in surprise at the question.

“I don’t know,” she offers, shrugging. “Shopping, I presume.”

“Why did they talk to _you_?”

Above them, she can hear the children race down the hallway, back towards the stairs, only to be called back by Dorothy’s lilting voice. Beth’s eyes chase the sound, searching the skinny ankles of her children through the bannister, but when she looks back at Dean, she doesn’t think he’s so much as twitched. Beth swallows, shrugs a little, and keeps her voice casual.

“Lord Huntington stopped to say hello to Annie, they’d met at a shooting competition last month. The one Annie went to with the footman, Mr. Brown.”

But Dean doesn’t seem interested in that. His hands fall to fist his hips, his head shaking as he doesn’t let her continue.

“Well did they say anything to you?”

“The Governor?”

Dean nods sharply, and Beth replies in kind, albeit with a softer gesture.

“Yes, we conversed,” she says slowly, and Dean swallows, shifts his weight strangely, the movement making his shadow jerk. 

“About what?”

“Nothing in particular. The governor wanted to introduce me to the deputy. I hadn’t met him before.”

She shrugs a little again as she says it, even as her eyes stay fixed on Dean’s strange posture, on the rapid way his pupils dart in the pale, watery pool of his irises. It reminds Beth vaguely of catching tadpoles with the children from a pond, and the thought of those black dots growing legs and springing clean off his face comes to mind, for it’s how quickly they dart. She exhales, shakes her head at the strange image, and when she’s stopped, Dean seems to have relaxed slightly.

“That’s it?” he asks, but before Beth can clarify that it wasn’t exactly, Dean’s back to tugging off his outerwear, adding: “I haven’t met Huntington yet. I’ve heard good things though. Has a son around Danny’s age. Could be a match for Emma or Jane one day.”

And well, that’s not particularly an avenue Beth even remotely wants to entertain, the memory of Annie crying in the kitchen still clear in her mind. Without acknowledging Dean’s later words, she answers his question instead. 

“The Governor did say that he wanted me to pass along his greetings to you. That he wished to see you, that it had been too long.”

It’s instant, the way Dean’s hands still again, the way he pales, and Beth watches him curiously, uncertain of why it is he’s so troubled by the words. Perhaps he is late on a carriage for the governor, she thinks, and as soon as the thought finds her, something in her relaxes. It would make sense after all – with the loaded way the Governor had said _too long_ , the way he clearly hadn’t wanted to bother Beth with it, despite his mockery. In which case, Beth knows precisely how to handle it anyway. At least her mother’s lesson of charming a lord husband’s associate had stuck.

“We should have him for an afternoon,” Beth decides. Dreading the thought of so much time in the Governor’s presence, but then - - it would be something to _do,_ and perhaps she could have him bring Lord Huntington. Secure his silence on Annie. Her mind ticks through the machinations of it. “We can have dinner, show him the new gardens, even take him to - - ”

“Who’d you go to the markets with?”

The question so startles her that it takes Beth’s mind a moment to find itself again – so distracted with the prospect of Turner and Huntington. To simply _catch up_. She blinks a little, taking in the lines of Dean’s face, the way his mouth is freshly pursed into the tiniest of circles, and she lets her own lips part, shaking her head. Holds her hands open to him in bafflement.

“I went with Annie.”

 _Like she always does_ , she thinks, but the sound that escapes Dean’s throat can only be described as a scoff.

“Annie? Bethie, that is - - that is _too dangerous,_ ” he insists, hands finding his hips all over again. “You are the lady of this house, and a lady should not be on the streets on her own. Dorothy can go, or one of the other maids. I - - I don’t want you there on your own like that.”

“I wasn’t alone,” Beth replies easily, briefly amused at the show. How many times has she gone to the markets on her own over the years? It must be hundreds. “I just said. I was with Annie.”

But any amusement in her tone dies in the air between them as Dean flusters. He rubs a hand over his mouth, drops it back to his hip, then pulls it back up to the air between them – a staccato of movement that has Beth’s frown finding her lips again.

“And what would Annie do, huh? If you were suddenly descended upon? You know there are all sorts of men who pass through those docks. Marines and - - and thugs and - - and _pirates_ even.”

“Pirates?” Beth asks, tone leaden with disbelief. “At our port?”

“Yes,” Dean says, floundering a little. “ _Pirates_. They - - they anchor out at sea, and they come in to the port on - - on these little rowboats and then they - - well, they _take women_ like you, Beth.”

He presents it as a fact, like pirates are a fixture of their life here, and it takes all Beth can not to scoff herself. She’s heard stories, of course, mostly through Annie, of battles at sea with the clink of swords and the bang of cannons, but they were just stories. Of lives far away from them, outside of the safety of their port.

Still, Beth looks at Dean, registers the tautness of his features, and she thinks of Turner again, and perhaps they know something she doesn’t. Perhaps there’s a threat, that _that_ was what the governor had wished to speak to Dean about, and it wasn’t about a carriage at all. She sighs, smoothing her hand at her belly.

“If your concern is that we will be attacked, I’d rather none of the maids went either,” Beth says carefully. “At least not without an escort. Perhaps Tyler could go with them - - ”

But Dean doesn’t seem to like that either.

“No! I mean. We don’t pay Tyler to escort maids to market. He’s here to guard the treasury, you know that.”

And, to be fair, she did. It was a trend of the people in town not to trust the small, new banks. To still keep their money, gold, heirlooms, assets shut away in well-guarded rooms. A dragon’s den of treasures, and Beth has seen the one within their walls only twice – once upon her marriage to Dean, and again when he had asked her to purchase something extravagant for his mother after his father’s death. It was an odd room – hidden beyond a secret corridor, and packed with assets – material and ephemeral – jewellery and heirloom furniture, embellished goods kept away from the children’s smudging fingers, bonds, deeds to the land, the houses, the carriage works.

But in the twenty years of their relationship, they’ve never had so much as a whisper of a threat to it, not to the treasury, and rather, Beth thinks, not pirates at port either. She huffs out a breath, exasperated with him.

“Dean - -” she starts, but before she can say anything, he strides back towards her, a hand up to silence her before he points it back at himself. 

“My word is final. You will not go again. In fact, you will not go out again until I say that it is safe,” he insists, before turning on the spot and storming up the stairs, and Beth can only watch, something white hot and furious curling her toes.

Her mother’s words find her like a mantra:

_Ask not, want not, hope not._

*

Supper passes in an awkward sort of quiet, the cake and the meal Dorothy had made – salted pork and minced greens – consumed with little more than schoolyard chatter from the children, and the occasional uncomfortable glance between Annie and Benjamin across the table. At the head of it, Dean stays his place, a dark edge to his movements as he cuts his pork with more gusto than necessary. The grey, stormy look on his face from earlier has yet to slip away from his features, and it’s enough to make Beth paint on a stiff, wide smile, to play happy families for the children, for her sister, for the staff, she’s not sure. Just - - for someone, she thinks.

At least the awkwardness doesn’t last, if only because Dean remains only so long as his promise is met. The second he scrapes his plate clean, he’s back in the foyer, pulling on his fresh-cleaned boots, his greatcoat, and disappearing out the front door, his familial duties apparently fulfilled.

Beth refuses to follow, to play chase, but it leaves her with the enquiring eyes of Annie, with her curled lip, and so Beth makes her own escape. Cleaning up each of the children herself, bathing them and readying them for bed without one of the staff, dragging the process out with long embraces and winding stories and letting herself slip into the comfort their warm, loving little faces give her, even as she hears Annie whisper angry words to Benjamin a few rooms down.

And when the last pair of little eyelashes fan shut, Beth, once again, goes to bed alone.

*

“Do you have preferred adornments for the day, my lady?”

Beth considers the question, sitting tall at her vanity. Her hair is already pinned up with just a few loose, strawberry blonde curls left hanging, and she is dressed well in an elegant, layered dress – white with a dizzying array of tiny blue flowers entangled in tiny green vines covering practically every inch. She twists a little in her seat to see herself better in the mirror, tilting her head as she takes in her reflection.

No pearls today. They won’t quite go, after all, and are perhaps unnecessary, if she is to be confined to her house, and she feels it again, the hang nail of fury at Dean, the twitch of her spirit, but she quiets it with the dart of distraction and thinks - -

Earrings.

“The gold Etruscans, Dorothy,” she requests, and at her side, Dorothy nods, opening Beth’s jewellery box and fishing through it.

Outside, a carriage rolls past the house, and Beth resists the urge to spring to her feet, to lurch out her open window and peer out into the street below, but it does not stop, so it can’t be him. Beth bites the inside of her cheek, sitting up a little straighter, peering back at her reflection again. She got a little sun yesterday, she thinks, can see the dusting of pink on her cheeks, her nose. She wonders if the memory of it will set Dean off again when he finally does come home.

He had not returned to her last night after storming out after supper. Had not clambered drunk into her bed, nor had she awoken to him shut away in his study, as she sometimes does. The absence of him had not hurt so much, but it had been strange, the memory of his odd behaviour and his untampered, bizarrely aimed temper, and it had kept her up much of the night, fixated on the sounds of the roaring ocean in the distance, letting it wash over her.

“The Etruscans - - I don’t suppose you left them by the bath last night?”

The words are enough to startle Beth, who twists back in her seat to look up at Dorothy’s face, trepidation evident in her expression. Beth’s forehead furrows as she lurches to her feet in response, moving enough that she can see into her jewellery box herself – can see her treasured pearl necklace, laid gently at the bottom, the malachite earrings her mother had left her, an array of smaller, simpler pieces, but - - no gold Etruscans.

Beth’s fingers escape up her neck, to her jaw, before pinching at her bare earlobe.

“No, I - - I didn’t wear them yesterday, I wore the silver teardrops.”

She can feel Dorothy looking at her, surprised, but Beth doesn’t look back, moving quickly to pull at the drawers of her vanity, to rifle through them, fumble through embellished ornaments and hair pins and the wrappings of her larger pieces, her breath coming shorter, sharper, because - -

Because it’s _not_ just the Gold Etruscans.

It’s her diamond foliate bracelet and her garnet kropfkette choker too.

None of them are here.

And perhaps Annie has borrowed them, Beth tells herself, willing herself to believe the lie, but the truths are sounding louder now, echoing through the cavern of her head:

Cradle.

Cufflinks.

Vase.

Her hands tremble.

“Would you like me to fetch your sister, Lady Boland?” Dorothy asks gently, and Beth’s neck cranes around to look at the other woman. “You’re looking a little pale. Perhaps some smelling salts?”

And they would probably be an idea, Beth thinks, smoothing a hand at her waist, feeling her belly twitch beneath the confines of her corset, but then this all feels too much. Her mind slips back to Dean’s strange behaviour yesterday, but surely that has nothing to do with this? He’d discussed the vase at such length with the children after all, had taken it seriously and spoken to the staff when her grandfather’s cufflinks had gone missing too, which means - - means the thief is likely among them. Beth purses her lips, shakes her head.

“No, it’s fine, I - - I think perhaps I have misplaced them after all,” she says, light as she can manage. She’ll speak to Annie. She’s friends with Mr. Brown after all, and perhaps can solve the matter inconspicuously. She swallows, opting to change the subject instead: “Has Lord Boland sent word of when he might return home?”

Dorothy just shakes her head.

*

The afternoon light glints off the bauble in Emma’s hair as she darts forwards across the grass, a puff of petticoats and pink silk as she tries to reclaim her porcelain doll from her brother’s grip.

“Kenneth,” Beth calls out, frowning across the gardens, and at least her eldest has the decency to look bashful at her expression, lowering his arms enough that Emma can grab the doll from his hands, clutching it tenderly to her tiny chest. After a moment, they go their separate ways, Kenneth wandering off to watch Jane and Daniel play Graces – the pair each wielding a stick as they toss a hoop between one another – while Emma ventures out to a small patch of flowers back towards the house.

“It is strange,” Annie agrees, continuing their former conversation, laid out on the picnic blanket beside Beth. “I mean, how much can go missing from one house? It has to be a thief, right?”

Beth hums in agreement. She really had been inclined to believe it accidents or misplacements, but she had never lost a pair of earrings before, and would certainly never have lost that particular pair – a favoured set.

“I was hoping you might speak to Mr. Brown again,” Beth says, leaning a little towards Annie, who just shakes her head back at her.

“Darren didn’t know a thing about it when I asked him last, and trust me, sister, he is _not_ the sort of guy who can keep something like this to himself. Besides, the only person who could go into your room unnoticed by anyone else would be Dorothy, and I mean. Can you imagine her out on the town in your garnet choker?”

Which - - well.

Beth rolls her eyes a little, because Annie isn’t wrong – the picture of her garnet choker on the older woman is not one that comes easily to mind.

The afternoon is brighter than it has any right to be, the warmth of it like summer’s final stretching shadow in the early autumn days. It leaves everything still green and bright, the shift of the seasonal flowers changing the colours of their gardens. From the corner of her eye, Beth sees a butterfly flit and then hears Emma promptly gasp, following it in delight while the other children continue to play. A warmth finds Beth’s chest at the image, a smile her face, and she watches her eldest daughter like she would a favourite show while Annie adjusts to lie further back on the blanket beside her.

“You know, there is another who could go into your room unnoticed,” Annie says, faux casual, and it’s enough to make Beth’s gaze snap back around to her sister, taking in her newly sprawled form, before turning stiffly back to Emma. 

“Don’t go there,” Beth says, and Annie hmphs, letting her own gaze follow Beth’s to the children, and it’s just - -

 _There,_ isn’t it?

The suggestion that perhaps Dean has something to do with the missing items.

It’s enough to make Beth shift on the blanket herself, the thought of it sprouting unwelcome as a weed in the fertile soil of her mind.

Because it’s not that it _hadn’t_ occurred to her, but what purpose would he have to remove things from his own home? The few things that were _hers_? The business was a roaring success – even Lord Huntington had complimented the carriages at the markets yesterday – so what use would Dean have for her earrings, their daughters’ cradle, cufflinks, a vase?

The way he’d smelt the other night – that too sweet perfume – wafts through her mind.

The weed in her trembles before it grows.

But _no_ , she reminds herself. She might not be naïve enough to imagine her husband incapable of that particular sin (although she still prays that he’s not), but if he _did_ have another woman for his bed, she’s at least sure he would not steal from his wife to dress her.

They had the wealth after all, if nothing else.

She shakes her head, searching out another line of thinking.

“He had the oddest thought yesterday,” Beth says, pivoting the topic. “That there were pirates about.”

More than anything, she’s expecting Annie to laugh, to break the moment. To toss her head back, perhaps even collapse entirely down on the picnic blanket like she’s sometimes prone to doing, wild with her own delight, only that’s not what she does at all. Instead, she just arches a thick eyebrow, thins her mouth.

“I’d heard rumours, but I thought it was just gossip,” she replies. “Maybe Deansie’s heard the same ones.”

It’s enough to give Beth pause. To stare back at her sister, her forehead furrowed, and her lip curled in disbelief.

“Oh, please,” she says, but Annie shakes her head.

“There’s talk the Governor lost a ship back when he was a Captain.”

“Governor Turner?”

Annie just gives her a look.

“No, the other governor, _yes,_ Governor Turner.”

Beth blinks. She’d known he’d been a Captain with the marines some years earlier, known that his time at sea had come to an end, but it wasn’t unusual for captains to take governor positions upon reaching a certain age. When they wanted to start families, usually. Not that Governor Turner had ever been anything but a bachelor, but she’d always supposed that was incidental to - - well. The _other_ rumours about him. 

Beth frowns.

“I don’t know what that has to do with pirates coming here,” she says slowly, and Annie rolls over on the blanket to face Beth properly.

“No imagination,” she says with a sigh, and that’s enough to make Beth arch an eyebrow back at her sister, but Annie just shrugs, adds: “I mean, I could tell you _my_ imaginings, but they’re just that. The only thing I’ve heard often enough to be true is that he ran into some at sea, and lost his ship, like I said.”

And fine, Beth thinks, tilting her chin up, looking out across the gardens at where Emma has abandoned her butterfly quest and is instead playing Graces with Jane, Daniel having abandoned the game for some version of cowboys with Kenneth.

It’s an interesting thought. That pirates could sail close to here. That perhaps Turner’s past might lap at this shore and ignite their streets, if it hasn’t already. Beth pauses, something in her twitching in a way she can’t explain. Can pirates thieve quietly? Perhaps - -

Annie scoffs, as if she’s read her mind.

“No, Beth, a pirate isn’t crossing the raging waters, risking it all, just to steal your daughter’s ugly cradle.”

Which - - well.

She scowls back at her sister, adjusts herself a little on the picnic blanket, pins and needles spiking up her leg and she hadn’t even realised it had fallen asleep. She stretches it out in as ladylike a fashion as she can, and promptly changes the subject altogether.

“Have you thought anymore on the matter with Lord Rabe?” Beth asks her, more for the distraction than anything, and she’s surprised when her sister sucks in a tired breath.

A moment passes, and Beth watches as Annie moves to sit up again, her hair tangled back and her face drawn.

“I thought all night about it,” she says, her voice pinned with the slightest of wobbles. “And I think you’re right. Benjamin should have their name. It’ll secure his future.”

“And yours,” Beth reminds her quickly, but Annie just plucks up a few blades of grass, makes an untidy pile of them on the picnic blanket beside her.

“That doesn’t matter,” Annie says, but before Beth can disagree, she adds: “Seeing Noah yesterday - - hearing the Governor - - I don’t want Benjamin to have to hear that anymore. I want him to have an inheritance, because it’s not like I have one of my own to give him these days. I want him to have the title and the name and the land and the manor. Even if it means he won’t be entirely mine anymore.”

A slight breeze picks up, bringing with it the cool, autumn air, the smell of dahlias and marigolds, that salt sea scent off the ocean, and Beth inhales deeply as she leans across the picnic blanket, engulfing Annie in her arms. A harsh, hoarse breath is exhaled at her breast, and Beth squeezes her sister all the tighter.

“It’s what’s best,” Beth says into her sister’s hair, and she means it. Knows it in her bones. “And you’ll always have here. You can travel between the two houses until you settle down with someone and can have your own house.”

A noise escapes Annie’s throat, and Beth feels the front of her dress warm with her sister’s deepening breaths.

“Who knows,” she continues, aiming for light even as she holds Annie closer. “Perhaps Gregory will even set you up with your own place nearby if Benjamin requests it.”

At least it’s enough to make Annie snort (and lord, isn’t anything better than the sob?), but really, Beth thinks, what are her sister’s options? Even with her son legitimised, it’s Benjamin who will see his reception changed, who will be granted the respect of a spot in court, a pathway into his future. Annie will still be the unwed mother, the disgraced daughter of a disgraced man, without the name of another to conceal her past behind like Beth has with Dean’s.

She will be the last of the Marks’.

Beth exhales deeply at the thought, wondering if her sister feels this as keenly as Beth herself (knows she does, knows she feels the shame of it), and she’s about to ask her when - -

“Papa!” Jane cries, dropping her stick and bolting across the gardens, and Beth blinks, twisting around to see Dean watching from the backdoor of the manor, his face pallid, and his eyes dull, and before she can latch onto her indignation again, she frowns.

Did he sleep at all last night?

 _No_ , she thinks. She shouldn’t worry after him, not after he’d left like that.

“I don’t even need to get any closer to know he smells like a tavern,” Annie says, starting to pull away, and Beth glances down at her sister, watching her as she sits up properly, and she should defend him, but looking back, watching as he accepts Jane’s thrown open arms, holds her to his sweating, filthy chest, she thinks of Gregory, only now acknowledging his son, acknowledging what he and Annie _were,_ and she says the only thing she knows how: 

“He loves them.”

Because he does. Because none of the rest of it matters more than that. It’s just like her mother always said. It doesn’t matter if she’ll always be left wanting, if he won’t share parts of his life with her, if he keeps her in the dark, because he _keeps_ her. He has kept her sister, her nephew. He thinks about the future of their children, and she knows he intends them each to have good ones, and - - 

“If love was all that mattered, I wouldn’t be losing my son for a title, and we wouldn’t be losing our family name for nothing.”

The words are hoarse, honest, and Beth spins to see Annie staring back at her, her face surprisingly hard, drawn in a way Beth can’t quite interpret, and she opens her mouth to say _that’s not true_ , that the love Annie has for her son will never not matter, but then she thinks that on paper, Benjamin will no longer be hers, and something in her splits in two.

So instead she says: 

“I’ll cook something tonight, and we can drink in the ladies’ apartment. Just us. To celebrate the good news.”

_Commiserate the bad._

And at least Annie hears the intent, because she huffs out a laugh, shakes her head and leans forwards, just enough to knock Beth’s arm.

“Thank you for the invite, sister, but I have plans already. _Darren_ knows of a certain _soiree_ with certain _favours_ which is of particular interest to me.”

And well, if that’s not a surprise. Beth rolls her eyes, but she’s unable to bite back the grin when Annie laughs, so she waves her off, watching as Annie clambers to her feet, brushing the grass off her dress in the process, and it’s only then, looking up at Annie, that Beth shields her face, and sees the sky.

She blinks in surprise, for the sun seems to be leaving them, the bright light getting slowly swallowed by thick, grey clouds.

“Well, be careful,” Beth says, gesturing up with her chin. “It looks like there’s a storm coming.”

“Always is somewhere,” Annie hums, turning on her heel, and Beth’s gaze finds Dean again, but he will not look up from their children to meet her.

*

“Where were you?”

She doesn’t ask it curtly, or too harshly. She’s not sure she has the wits for it. Not sure if her stomach could take another night of him disappeared from their house, somewhere in the streets of this town, at the works or a tavern or some other woman’s bed. Instead she gently folds back their bed linens, smoothing her hands over the sheets as she slips between them, and finally lets herself look at Dean.

He hadn’t eaten supper with them after all. Hadn’t helped her put the children to bed, nor entertained her company in the living room. Instead, he’d gone straight to his study and spent much of the evening pouring over his books, and Beth had instead seen Annie off for a night of no doubt debauchery before retiring to their chambers to count through every bracelet and bauble she had in a strange sort of anticipation.

“I had business to attend to,” he says after a minute, and Beth tilts her head, watching as he nestles into the pillow, his long body dipping the mattress, and he seems to clock it – whatever look is on her face – for his bottom lip wobbles, his throat bobs, and Beth simply sighs.

She turns away from him.

“It’s for the family,” he promises her quietly, and god, Beth hopes beyond hope that it is.

*

The bed dips, and Beth rouses from her sleep, her features pinching as she grows aware of the bleak, clouded night outside her bedroom window. Within moments, thunder claps, startling her, her eyes blearily opening in time to catch the flash of lightning that chases it. She wets her dry lips, shifting forwards slightly on the mattress as she feels the weight on the other side move.

“Not tonight,” she says, voice groggy, willing Dean away as she tightens her grip on her blankets, only the voice that meets her is decidedly _not_ that of her lord husband’s.

“No? Maybe another then.”

The words are drawled low out into the darkened room, and Beth’s heart quickens at the unfamiliar tenor.

She sits up, quick as she can, twisting around to look across the other side of the bed, and it takes all her wits not to scream. There, standing but for a knee sunk into the spot her husband should be resting, is a man she couldn’t hope to know. He’s tall – although not as tall as Dean – and practically half the width of him, but where Dean’s size softens, the stranger’s own casts a sharp, stark line, strong somehow beneath his ankle-length black pants and his faded black shirt – which is open down to the middle of his chest – and the heavy black coat he wears atop it.

She can’t quite make out his features, not in the darkness of her chambers, but she can see black eyes and sharp cheekbones, can see the way his full lips tug up as his gaze drops to where her chest heaves beneath the thin fabric of her night dress. With a gasp, she grabs at the blankets to cover herself, curling back in on herself protectively.

“Who are you? What are you doing in my chambers?”

Her words seem enough to amuse him, for his posture shifts, his hands burying in the pockets of his coat, his head lolling easily to the side.

“Oh, relax, sweetheart,” he drawls. “See, I was just havin’ a little conversation with your lord husband, but we ain’t seein’ eye-to-eye. You bein’ his lady wife and whatnot, I thought maybe you could help us out. You know. Get him to see reason.”

Beth stares at the shadowed outline of him, her eyes wide, scrambling for any semblance of a thought in her head, and as if on cue, thunder rumbles through the streets, echoing through the room and then – again – a flash of white lightning. Only this time, when it tears through the darkness, it lights them both up, and she sees him – really _sees_ him for a spell – and she doesn’t know what she was expecting, but it wasn’t _this_. The handsome sculpt of his face like something realised with an artist’s hand, his eyes dark, yes, but _bright_ , his lips full, his hair neat and shorn down, and on his neck a - - a - -

The room plunges back into darkness and Beth can barely breathe.

“You wished to converse with Lord Boland in the middle of the night?” she asks tentatively, still breathless, and the stranger hums in affirmation, pulling his knee off the bed and she expects him to step back, to breed a little dignity back into the moment, but instead he slowly moves towards the end of the bed, rounding towards her side, and something in her _tightens_ in a way she’s never felt before, and it’s fear, surely, for this man is _dangerous_. Her fingers hold the blankets tighter, and something warm floods her as she watches him prowl towards her only to - - to _stop_.

Suddenly, he pulls his gaze away from her, his arms folding behind his back, eyes roaming her chambers instead of - - of _her,_ and Beth blinks, her leg twitching, like she’s been released from a spell. She sits up taller, and swallows thickly. 

“Return in the morning. In the light.”

And perhaps it was not the smartest thing, the brightest, because the stranger’s head whips around to look at her again, his eyebrows raised in disbelief as he stares at her, and the flush is back, but it feels different this time. More familiar. She tilts up her chin, as regal, as ladylike as she can manage, so perhaps they can both remember her station. So he might remember _his_ , because surely no decent man of any decent house would spend his time in a lord’s wife’s chambers at ungodly hours (and is this him, she wonders? The thief? Does this mean that Dean had known him all along?)

The thought tangles in her, and she adjusts her weight in her bed, the need to feel her way to firmer ground – to understand what this _is –_ building towards a greater urgency, and until she can do it for real, she thinks she can at least pretend. She peers back at the stranger, schooling her features.

“I shall discuss with my lord husband whatever this matter is,” she says primly. “And on your return, we will - - ”

The stranger moves quickly, rounding the bed with a catlike grace, and it’s so sudden – his hand on her arm – big and hot, yanking her from the bed. Her legs wobble gracelessly as her bare feet hit the hard floor, and then she’s spun, her back colliding with his chest, his arm slipping around her waist, hand clasping in the thin fabric of her nightdress. Beth gasps, her hands scrambling, her skin burning, and he’s so _firm_ behind her, his body heat radiating through his shirt, enough she can _feel it_ , and - -

Another clap of thunder.

A flash of lightning.

A cutlass against her throat.

Beth shivers as the cool, sharp metal presses a little harder, enough she’s sure any deeper breath would slit her throat, and then the stranger’s head dips over her shoulder. His breath is hot at the shell of her ear.

“Yeah, see, I think you misread the situation, darlin’. You ain’t in charge of this house right now.”

Beth’s arms hang limp at her sides, and she can’t get them to move anymore, can’t get them to do anything more than hang, and her eyes are so dry but they won’t blink, and she trembles, a new sprout against the firm, hard trunk of him.

“So here’s what’s going to happen. I’m gonna take you downstairs, and you’re gonna use that pretty little mouth of yours and talk that pigeon-livered fool you call a husband into showin’ us where you store your money, because word is it ain’t in a bank. You understand?”

And is that he wants? To rob them of their savings? Of Dean’s earnings and the last of her own family’s wealth? Her mind reels, running through a hundred acts, a hundred plans, all she could do, say, but - -

But her children sleep in this house.

Her sister.

Her nephew.

Slowly, Beth nods, trying to withdraw her neck from the blade, and behind her the stranger hums, dissatisfied, his grip firming at the curve of her waist.

“I need to hear you say it.”

Of course he does, she thinks, something defiant burning low in her belly, but still. She says it.

“I understand. I will tell my lord husband to show you where the treasury is.”

And just as suddenly as he’d grabbed her, the stranger releases her.

Beth staggers forwards, the soft soles of her feet struggling to still against the wooden floors of the room, and she spins back to face him, raising her hands defensively, but the stranger only smiles wanly at her. They pause for a moment, taking each other in, when the stranger gestures to the door of her chambers with his cutlass.

“Oh, after you, Lady Boland,” he says, his voice loaded with condescension, and Beth doesn’t take her eyes off him as she fumbles for her robe, wrapping it around her still-trembling body. Out of instinct more than anything, she reaches for the oil lamp, but as soon as the thought of how she might use it (break it, perhaps, across his head) crosses her mind, the cutlass is positioned before her.

“Nuh-uh,” he says, like he knew, and instead he walks around her, takes it himself in a big hand, before gesturing her towards her bedroom door. Beth does as instructed, her mind reeling, because - -

Because she needs to get to the children.

Whatever this is, whoever _he_ is, this is Dean’s to handle. Beth must find her children.

She needs to see their faces, hold their hands, keep them _safe_.

Slowly, Beth steps out into the hall, her eyes darting sideways, taking in the six doors that line the corridor, each home to one of her children, to Benjamin, to Annie too (and oh, god, _Annie_ ). Beth sucks in a breath and she can feel the stranger behind her more than see him, can feel the slightest warmth of his presence, whether from the heat radiating from his body or the contained flame of the oil lamp, she has no idea, but it’s enough to still her step, to leave her gaze leaping from door-to-door-to-door.

Could she run through one of them? Find one of them? But then - - the others.

A grunt suddenly sounds behind her, and Beth jumps, head jerking back in time to see the stranger’s shadowed face.

“ _Move_ ,” he says roughly, and right, Beth thinks. Swallowing thickly, she starts walking forwards, only to stop again when they pass the first open door – Jane’s room – and Beth’s gaze settles on the empty, unmade bed.

Her heart lurches, and she spins, colliding almost bodily with the stranger behind her.

“My children - - “

But before she can get another word out, the door of the library at the far end of the hall whines open, and Beth spins back around again in time to see a man stride out. Even from afar, she can see that he is perhaps of a height with her, but broad – not so tall or lean as the stranger at her back – with a shaved head, but a thick, dark beard. He’s dressed rather simply, in knee-length cream trousers, long white socks beneath. A tight navy jacket with dulled gold buttons, and on his thumb he wears a ring which - -

Beth blinks, fixing on it.

Not for long though.

After all, the man does not aim for the stairs, but instead strides forwards to meet them down the corridor, and as he nears she takes in many tattoos – only half visible in the half light – but - - there’s something else on his face too. A mark at his cheek, something like the fresh clip of a bruise, and the stranger seems to notice it at the exact moment Beth herself does, for suddenly he says:

“Someone else here?”

His voice is as quick as any arrow, direct in a way that makes Beth’s mind reel, leaves something in her quickening in hope. Perhaps Dean has this under control, perhaps - -

“Just kids,” the man grunts back, shaking his head, and Beth stares, unblinking at him. “The oldest boy threw hands.”

The oldest boy - - Benjamin? Something in her clutches tight.

“You better not have hurt him,” she says, her own voice sharp, heart pounding, but both of the men ignore her.

“He gonna be a problem?”

“Nah,” the man shakes his head again. “Stan’s with the kids now. Plus the maid. It looks like another woman lives here too – another lady – but she ain’t here.”

Annie.

She must still be out, Beth thinks, something like relief uncurling in her belly, because god, at least that means she’s _safe_. Beth inhales, looking at the man in front of her before twisting back around to the stranger, taking in his dark features, staring down at her, unbothered. She sets her jaw, puts as much ladylike firmness in her tone as she can muster.

“This _Stan_ better not the hurt the children. Or Dorothy.”

And it’s just so _sudden_ – the crack of laughter that escapes both of the men, and Beth’s gaze darts between them, her cheeks flushing, but - - but the laughter doesn’t sound cruel, more - - _open_ , amused. Like she’d just said something particularly funny. Beth’s frown deepens, and she shifts her weight, willing herself taller, bigger, stronger. Willing herself like her mother – formidable enough to instruct even the most surly of men, but - -

She’s not sure her mother ever faced men like _this_.

“Yeah, you don’t got to worry about that,” the stranger drawls, and Beth stares at him, swallows at his closed look. “All you got to worry about is gettin’ that lord husband of yours to talk.”

And right, Beth thinks, moving when the stranger nudges her forwards again, when the man leads her down the corridor (and oh, how her gaze lingers on the library door), then down the curved staircase. The floorboards creak beneath their feet, but all Beth can hear is the stutter of her own heartbeat, all she can feel is the way her nerves fire, her throat judders, and strangely, all she can smell is the salt off the sea on the stranger at her back.

*

In the dining room, there are three men.

Two stand above the table she feeds her children at. Big men. Men with scarred faces and sunburnt necks, one with an eyepatch, the string to tie it pinching at his skin, the other wielding a thick-tipped machete that leaves Beth’s breath trapped in her throat. That makes her wish to turn around and flee, only then her eyes fix on the last man. Tied bruised and bloody to a chair, his body curved forwards, so low his forehead almost touches the table, and it’s sudden. The way she recognises him.

With a gasp, Beth hurries forwards, the stranger and the bearded man letting her, and all four of the other men simply watch as she races to her husband’s side, her fingers finding his face, tugging it up to meet hers.

“Beth?” he asks, voice wobbly and his eyes wet, and Beth nods. Quickly, she pulls off the sash from her robe, balls it in her hand just enough to use it to wipe some of the blood from his temple.

“I’m here,” she says gently, her gaze darting over his face. None of the wounds seem deep, she thinks. Surface wounds mostly – cuts and abrasions as opposed to punctures, although one of his eyes is practically swollen shut. She sighs, lets her gaze dart back across the table to where the stranger now stands across the other side of it, watching her carefully.

For a moment, she just takes them in again, the curved formation of these men in her house. Taking in the stronger set of them. They are unlike the men in town, unlike even the men she sees at the markets, working the docks. There’s an air to them that sparks dangerous, that speaks of hard lines and harder edges, a bullishness that promises anyone coming against them will be found wanting. In that sense, the stranger seems almost like the sweetest – dark eyes with long lashes, soft lips, a lean form that belies a strength (because god, how easily he’d pulled her from her bed. How immovable he’d seemed when he’d held her back against him).

She tears her gaze away from him, fixing on the bearded man instead, and she can’t help it. The way her eyes drift down to his hands, settling on that ring again. 

Wetting her lips, she turns back, adjusting the sash from her robe to a cleaner patch of fabric, blotting at a new wound, when out of the corner of her eye she sees the stranger flip his cutlass in his hands and impale it in the hardwood of the table.

Beth gasps, hand to her chest, jumping back a little from Dean before she can help it. The stranger seems to clock it, a sly grin crossing his face, as his gaze slides from him to her.

“Our agreement,” he says, and right, Beth thinks, flustering. She bends back down towards Dean, swallowing thickly.

“You must take him to the treasury,” she tells him, her voice low, and Dean blinks his less swollen eye back up at her. Something seems to pass his expression, a twisting, twisted look, and Beth’s chest tightens as Dean shakes his head.

“I - - I - - _No_ , Bethie, I _can’t_. I already told him that.”

“You can,” she insists, and she’s surprised to find she means it. “It’s just money. He cannot take the land, the business. Everything else may be earned back.”

His eyes are bluer than she ever remembers, and they’re bright right now, in the dim light of their dining room. The oil lamps have not been lit in here – none but the one the stranger took from her bedroom. Instead, the men have laid out three large shipping lanterns, and Dean’s words from the other day come back to her. The way he’d been so insistent, on there being _pirates_ around, and - -

Had he known this would happen?

Had he truly wanted to protect her the other day? When he had bound her to the house?

She looks back at the men, at the stranger’s bored, unimpressed look, and then at the bearded man, that damned ring again, and then another too. He moves, and the forest green greatcoat that adorns his shoulders rustles, a tiny crest on the breast, just aside the top layer of the coat, catching her eye, and Beth pauses in surprise, eyes fixing all over, when Dean trembles at her side.

“I can’t, Beth, I _won’t_.”

It’s enough to make the stranger’s jaw rock, and Beth drops back down to Dean’s side, curling herself closer to his body, seeking out his gaze. When he avoids it, she brings a hand to his cheek, wills his compliance, wills him to lay down his pride, just this _once_ , so that the men might leave this house. So that they might move past this strange and terrible night.

“It’s for our children,” she tells him, voice weighted with urgency, remembering his words to her from this very night. “They are upstairs right now with one of these men. Terrified. They will not be safe until this is done.”

Outside, thunder claps. The shatter of rain roars louder against the slatted roof of the manor, swallows up every sound except Dean’s shallow breaths. His gaze skirts her face, softens in a way she’s rarely seen, something in it that is just - - so _lost_ to her, but whatever it is, it passes quickly as he suddenly shakes his head.

“No,” he whines. Then, firmer: “I will not take them.”

He sets his shoulders proudly, and Beth blinks, heart pounding, twisting back to look at the men, scrambling for a plan, when suddenly the stranger rocks his head from side to side, considering, and then, too quickly, he pulls the cutlass out of the table, and transports himself around the table so fast that Beth gasps. She lurches forwards, willing herself to protect her wounded husband, but she’s suddenly grabbed from behind by one of the other men, pulled into a loose hold as the stranger points the long, taut edge of the cutlass to Dean’s throat.

“I’m done negotiating,” he says, voice low and dangerous in a way that makes Beth shiver, and her pulse races as he lifts the cutlass to Dean’s bobbing Adam’s apple.

“What are you going to do?” Dean bites, and he means it harsh, but it sounds desperate in Beth’s ears. She tries to break forwards, but the man yanks her easily back, firming his hold on her as he pulls her back into him, and she turns enough to see a tiny family crest at the pocket of his greatcoat, and Beth blinks, her mind suddenly reeling.

“Kill me?” Dean continues. “The treasury doesn’t open without my word, so - - ”

“Nah,” the stranger thrums, interrupting. “But see, you don’t need every part of your face to take us. Ain’t that right, Demon?”

The stranger twists, and both Beth and Dean look sideways at one of the pirate’s, who just laughs, finger coming up to flick the bottom of his eyepatch, tugging it up until they can all see the gaping hold of his eye socket. Beth’s head lolls, and briefly she feels faint, and it takes her a moment to lift her head again, for her gaze to find Dean, and he’s paler than she’s ever seen him, writhing back in his seat as the stranger raises the cutlass to his cheekbone, just to the side of his eye. Dean’s pants dampen, and the blood roars in Beth’s ear, her spirit twitching, and she can see the stranger grin, can hear the wild weather whip outside, and - -

“I can take you!”

It takes the stranger’s head twisting around to look at her, his eyebrow raised, his cutlass still an inch away from Dean’s eye for Beth to even realise that it’s her who’s said it. She shifts, heart battering in her chest, but she doesn’t blink, doesn’t so much as swallow.

“Oh, you can, huh?”

Beth finds herself and nods, sharp as she can.

“With a note from Lord Boland, I can take you.”

That’s how she’d gotten Judith’s gift after all, the day Dean had asked her to, and she’s sure she could do it again. Sure Tyler will let her through, oblivious in his innocence.

The stranger sucks in his lips, gaze briefly flicking over her face again, then dipping down just so in a way that makes something in Beth warm, before he turns back to Dean.

“You gonna write your lady wife a note?”

Dean opens and closes his mouth a few times, gawping like a fish, and then his look moves between the two of them – from the stranger to Beth and then back again – like his mind is racing through their options, perhaps thinking of another way out of all of this, and god, Beth thinks, there _isn’t_ one. She stands up a little taller in the other man’s grip and speaks again before Dean does.

It’s her duty, she reminds herself. To take care of the family when her husband cannot.

“I do this for you, and you release my children and my husband, and you leave this house,” she says, tilting up her chin in defiance as she balls her hands into fists – anything to stop her fingers from trembling – as the stranger just watches her. She thinks she sees a thousand looks cross his face as he takes her in, and after a moment, he just nods.

“Bethie,” Dean says suddenly, but Beth cuts him off. He had tried to protect her.

Now it’s turn to protect him.

“Write it,” she tells him, and with that, Dean nods, and the stranger steps back, finally removing his cutlass from Dean’s cheek, and Beth can only watch as her husband crumbles back in his seat. She sucks in a breath, steeling her nerves, turning back to where the stranger is staring back at her expectantly.

“We have paper and quills in the study down the hall,” she says, and with a mere flick of the stranger’s head, one of his men goes, returns with the paper, sliding it to Dean, while the one who’d been clutching Beth releases her, moving to unbind Dean’s hands instead.

Upstairs, a loud noise sounds, and Beth’s gaze darts up, a look of confusion crossing her face because that - - it sounded like Jane.

It sounded like Jane _laughing_.

Beth inhales sharply because no. Thinking of the children will do her no good just yet. She refocuses on Dean, who raises a trembling hand, scrawling out a note, granting Beth permission to lead a stranger to their treasury, to their material wealth, and it’s what must be done, Beth reminds herself. To get through this night.

When he’s finished, Dean gestures Beth close, and the men just watch as Beth walks quickly back to Dean, her bare feet warm against the long, wooden floors. She casts her eyes briefly over the note, checking it, before folding it in half, is ready to move when Dean suddenly grabs at her wrist, his eyes darting to where the stranger lazily watches them.

It takes him a moment to speak – his tongue darting out to wet his lips – and Beth waits, impatient to be done with this, feeling his clammy hands on her skin.

“He can have whatever he wants,” Dean tells her after a moment, and then, voice tighter: “Just - - give him whatever he wants, okay?”

And Beth thinks of family history, of treasures, of things that can’t ever be replaced or re-earned or won back. She thinks of the uncertain future that awaits after this night, but then she looks at his bruised and beaten face, and she thinks of how quiet he must’ve been, for her to not arouse, how much he must’ve tried to keep this from them. She exhales, nodding, before she stands up a little straighter, and in some ways, she’s lucky, she thinks.

Her pride has been through worse.

*

His lantern needs oiling.

It’s all she can think, hearing the metal handle whine behind her as the stranger follows her out of the dining room. He had left the delicate lamp from her bedroom behind in the dining room with her husband, opting instead for one of the large shipping lanterns the other men had clutched. The rough, weather-worn metal of it somehow fitting best in his hand, and Beth had only nodded, clutching the note from her husband, her robe billowing open now without her sash, leaving her nightdress feeling all the thinner.

Out of the dining room, they start down the hall, passing the ladies apartment and heading instead for Dean’s study, an unfamiliar place for her, a stranger in itself, since she is no more allowed in there than Dean is in the ladies apartment, and by the time they reach it, the impropriety of it briefly gives her pause.

Which is almost funny, she thinks, a little breathless.

Thinking a thing of impropriety of anything when she is leading a pirate to her husband’s stores in little more than her undergarments.

She sucks in a breath, jigs the handle and lets them both in.

Dean’s study has always been one of the smaller rooms in the house. A façade for what it conceals. The dark panelled walls give way to polished wood floors, a large, carved oak desk, a portrait of his father, a clock, a bookshelf, a fireplace. The smell of ash sits heavy in the air, the fire not long put out, and Beth lets her eyes rest on the burnt kindling, one or two tiny embers still flicking gold among the wreckage.

After a moment, Beth crosses the threshold of the room, her bare feet twitching against the frigid floorboards as she glides over to the far wall, her hands immediately groping at the panelling, looking for that narrow, loose line to signify the hidden door. Her fingers keep moving, searching, when suddenly the light gets brighter all around her, and then she can feel him, he’s so close.

The heat from his body, radiating against her back, his breath above her, hitting the crown of her head, and Beth shivers before she can help herself, heart stuttering in her chest, turning wide eyes back up at him, because is he - - what is he - -

But he’s just looking, she realises, like he knows what she herself is searching for.

“You don’t have to stand so close,” she says sharply, and she flushes when he looks down at her, eyebrow raised in question, and god, this man is _dangerous_ , she reminds herself, thinks of her husband, with the cutlass to his eye, and she should apologise, but before she can, the stranger just holds up his free hand in something akin to apology himself, taking a small step back in the process. Not so much to not still loom, but enough to give her a little room to catch her breath, and Beth stares in surprise, because - -

Because she cannot remember the last time a man gave her space when she asked for it.

She blinks, twisting back to stare at the wall, chest and cheeks flushed, refixing on the surface of it for distraction as much as purpose. Finally finding the catch, she claws her nails in, levers it, and the wall opens with a fine little _pop_.

Behind her, the stranger makes a vague noise Beth can’t quite interpret, tilting around her as he stares down the narrow stone passageway that runs parallel to this room, leading to the hidden chamber between Dean’s study and the living room. The guarded treasury, the filled pocket of the family coat.

Clearing her throat, Beth steps inside, shivering a little at the hard stone walls, and the stranger promptly slips in behind her. She can already see Tyler’s feet in the distance, overhanging the corner, crossed at the ankle, and she’s sure he is likely dozing, oblivious to tonight’s events (a wasted salary, if she’s quite honest), and she should awaken him. Alert him to their presence, but - -

But she looks back at the stranger again, takes in the calm look on his face as she leads him, and she can’t help it.

She has to ask.

“How many houses have you looted tonight?”

There’s something in the surprise on his face that shoots through her, warms in her, and he schools the look too quickly, but she knows that she saw it. Knows, strangely, that she wants to see it again, so she adds: “Before you deny it, I know that we are at least your third.”

He doesn’t reward her with such a look this time, just keeps up his slow pace behind her down the corridor, hand still on the lantern.

“Yeah? How you figure that?”

And it had surprised Beth too, but once she had seen it in that dining room, she hadn’t been able to unsee it. Is sure if she’d stayed in there much longer, she would’ve seen even more tells of it. 

“The ring your man is wearing belongs to Lord Huntington,” she tells him. “And the greatcoat your other associate is wearing belongs to Lord Bishop. It has the smallest token of the family crest on the breast pocket. I saw it when he held me and I know it well, so do not deny that either.”

Lady Asmita’s husband. It had taken a minute, in the flurry, to place it, but the moment she had, she’d known it to be true. After that, Lord Huntington’s ring had been easy to place as well, for the intricate design on the side of it.

Behind her, the stranger hums, and Beth chances a look back, sees something on his face that if she didn’t know any better would almost seem _impressed_ , but that - - Beth blinks, head forwards again, feeling something inside her tighten, because that’s perhaps not something she’s used to either.

 _Stupid_ , she thinks. A trick of the light.

“Fifth,” he drawls, offers it like a reward, and something in Beth sharpens brightly. “You’re the fifth house.”

Her first instinct is to ask _who else_? To be able to guide her own feelings, her expectations for what happens after this night by the peers who will find themselves in similar situations, but then - - perhaps that is not the concern.

“So it’s not personal,” she says instead, mind latching onto the sentiment, then quickening her tongue. “So you do not need to take anything. You could just leave.”

“Didn’t say it wasn’t personal.”

Beth looks back at him again, and his face is closed now. The angles of him like something Beth couldn’t hope to name – the light from the lantern licking up his features, and there’s something about it – about the very look of him – that makes Beth feel - -

Something.

So focused is she on him, that she doesn’t notice the small step to get them up to the treasury room, and she almost collapses sideways. Would have, perhaps, if the stranger had not jerked an arm out so suddenly to grab her. Beth blinks rapidly, feeling his large, warm hand on her arm again, circling the entirety of it, just above her elbow, and she flails, tries to push him off, because she _should_ , because it’s not _right_ for this strange, thieving man to be so close at all to her - - a _lady_ \- - her cheeks burning, when he huffs out a breath, releasing her.

And well - -

Maybe how cold her arm feels at the release is even odder.

Beth blinks, her step stopped, her gaze darting up to his, and he’s still just staring down at her, an unbothered look on his face, when he jerks his chin up the small step to the treasury room.

“Let’s just do this,” he says, and right, Beth thinks.

Of course.

She sucks in a breath, steeling herself as she picks up her step, eyes fixing on Tyler’s lazing feet, and when they finally reach him, true to form, he’s fast asleep, half pressed into the stone wall, half collapsed into the small stool they leave out for him. And - - perhaps it’s not the _best_ look, Beth thinks, her cheeks flushing when she hears the stranger’s unimpressed sound behind her.

She clears her throat.

“Mr. Emery,” she says, loud and bright. “Good evening.”

It’s enough to make Tyler flounder awake, to jerk up in his seat, and Beth paints on her brightest, most disarming smile, as Tyler turns on her an excitable look.

“Lady Boland!” he hums, and before he can get another word in, his gaze falls on the stranger clutching the shipping lantern and his hand falls to the blade at his belt.

“Who’s he?”

“An associate of Lord Boland’s,” Beth says easily, and she can feel the stranger’s gaze fix on her again. Vaguely, she wonders if the stranger had thought she might have rolled. Had expected her to rely on Tyler for protection from him. To have sacrificed Tyler for what? Minutes of safety? She sets her shoulders back. “He was supposed to pick something up earlier today, but his journey was longer than anticipated, and Lord Boland has taken ill. He has sent me instead.”

She holds out the slip of paper, which Tyler takes, reading it over, his mouth working. A brief look of confusion crosses his face, and he blinks back up at her, his lips pursed, taking her in.

“Lord Boland told me you aren’t allowed in here.”

Which - -

Beth blinks.

She’d read the note herself, unless - - unless Dean had some sort of code perhaps? She hadn’t thought him so clever, and asks as much: “In the note?”

But Tyler just shakes his head.

“No, he says you can in that, but - - he’s usually pretty insistent.”

The sentiment gives Beth pause, and she stares back at Tyler, her lips parted, thinking her way through the sentiment, when suddenly the stranger speaks up behind her.

“It’s just like the lady says, Mr. Emery,” he guides. “I’m an associate of his, and he ain’t well. We won’t be long.”

Tyler’s mouth does something strange then, gaze flicking between the two of them uncertainly, but he gets to his feet all the same, unlocking the door with one of the many jangling keys off his ring hook, and Beth steels her body, prepares herself for it all – for the catalogue of their wealth, the inevitable loss of it when the stranger takes it, and it’s worth it, she reminds herself. This is for the family. For her children, for Dean.

The door opens with a gasp, and Tyler steps aside, clearing a path for Beth and the stranger to walk in. Bowing her head gratefully, Beth leads the way, striding forwards through the treasury doorway, only to stop.

To freeze as if she has slipped below the surface of a frosted lake, because the room is - -

It’s _empty_.

All of it. The wooden shelves are barren, the cabinets cleaned out, the covered paintings, sculptures, vases all gone. The only thing that remains are the cobwebs in the corners and a few meagre boxes, propped beneath the far shelves.

Gone is the gold, the money, the most precious jewellery, her family’s meagre heirlooms, and Dean’s gaudy ones, her father’s and his.

She steps tentatively forwards, willing it a dream, but she knows it’s not one she will ever wake from, hears it in every echo of every footstep. She can barely breathe, the sound coming hoarse as the stranger strides ahead of her, a tightness to his step she can’t decipher, and she feels faint, because if it’s gone from here - - if they’re only being robbed _now_ \- - where has it gone? Where has - -

And surely Dean knew, surely he - -

Beth drops a hand, tightens it in the belly of her nightdress, her gaze skirting around them, between them, and the note is still tangled in her other hand, and then she thinks of Dean’s words. No. Doesn’t think them.

They _sound_.

Loud as a score in her head.

 _Give him whatever he wants_.

But there was nothing here to give, nothing but - -

Suddenly the stranger looks at her, and she sees it in his face, in his darkening look. That he knows it too – what her lord husband had wanted her to do, what he’d wanted her to _give_ to guarantee her family’s safety, and she’s trembling now – some red hot cocktail of fury and fear and shame and it is like her father, marrying her off to someone less than her, no - - _worse_ \- - and is this what she was destined to be?

The last card to play of the men who were supposed to love her?

She looks away quickly, her mind scrambling for any hint of a plan, and she can summon Tyler, use his knife if he can’t, she can - -

“Yeah, that ain’t somethin’ you gotta worry about.”

The stranger offers the words simply, no edge in his voice, and her head whips back up to face him, and it’s strange, she thinks, the look on his face. Like he’s smoothed out his features, softened them, so as not to appear a threat to her. Like he understands her position, like he cares about it, if only in the moment.

The oil lamps stay on in the treasury, so his lantern is unnecessary, the room perhaps the best lit in the house if only so perhaps Dean can look upon their losses, and the thought of Dean curdles in her like milk left in the sun. But still, she thinks. Her pride can’t let him ruin them - - _her_ so.

“He didn’t mean - - ”

“Nah, he did,” the stranger interjects instantly, and he just looks at her, lifts a shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “You know exactly what he wanted you to do. Guess it ain’t somethin’ he’s done before, huh? Sellin’ your ass to save his own. But it ain’t somethin’ you should forget now that he has.”

Beth just stares at him, her eyes wide, her throat constricting, and at her silence, the stranger huffs out a breath. He strides ahead again towards the boxes in the corner, rifles through them briefly, turning through a few small items, and Beth only watches the line of him as he crouches down to the ones below, drops the lantern to the floor, his shoulders leaning forwards, his back curving like a windswept sail.

“What are you going to do us then?” she asks him, because he must want something, because otherwise this doesn’t make _sense,_ and at the words, the stranger peers back, an eyebrow popped as he purses his lips, shakes his head.

“Nothin’.”

Because she has nothing he wants, she thinks, but - - no, it’s worse than that. She has nothing to _give_ , and it’s pity she hears in his tone, and she doesn’t know why, but it curdles something worse in her. The memory of his brief impress suddenly torn from her, and it’s bad enough on it’s own, but the knowledge that he’d leave her here like this – to slip out like he’d never been here at all, like her life was the same before he appeared – makes her clutch her hands in the folds of her nightgown.

“You said it was personal,” she tells him, an edge of insistence in her voice, and the stranger blinks back at her, as if surprised, but then that pitying look crosses his face again, and he shakes his head, turning back towards his inspection of the box.

“That ain’t got anythin’ to do with you and yours, yeah? That husband of yours was just in the way.”

_Just in the way._

The words are enough to make Beth exhale a stuttered breath, to jerk her gaze away, her chest heaving, and it’s not enough. There’s nothing in here to split her focus from the room as it is – the sheer emptiness of it, the degradation of it all, and she wonders if this is what her mother saw, in those final days? If she’d been made to stand in the husk of her fortune, behind a guard they could no longer afford.

Beth unballs her fist, willing herself to calm, her gaze only snapping back to the stranger when he yanks some papers out of one of the boxes. He casts his eyes over them and then, after a minute, slips them into the inner pocket of his coat, and she should ask what they are. Knows she should, but the words dry on her tongue.

After a moment, the stranger stands back up again, leaving the shipping lantern on the dark stone floor, and turning around, loping towards the door of the treasury, and he must be done with them, Beth thinks, swallowing. This part of his night over. Must be about to escape out into the world outside of here, Beth left to exist as a footnote in his story, an errant aside, if she’s to be thought of at all, and her eyelashes quiver shut as that smell of saltwater seems to glide through her senses again, and it’s over. Done, he’ll go and she’ll have to return upstairs. Have to face her husband, have to - -

“He’s gutless.”

At the words, Beth’s eyes snap back open, and she’s met with the stranger’s own staring back at her, taking her in, and how long had he been looking at her? He wets his lips, shakes his head, and Beth swallows, blinks a little rapidly in reply.

“And judgin’ by my boy’s face, he’s the only one in this house who is,” the stranger continues, and Beth stares back at him, thinking of Benjamin throwing a punch to protect his cousins, but then - -

Did he mean her too?

She can hear her own breaths, warming the space between them, and she feels something in his look. Like maybe he wants to see how she responds, like he expects something out of her, like he sees the way her spirit twitches, and it’s strange, the way something in her balks at that. She is a _good wife._ She has led a good house, this is not - - _she’s_ not - -

“He’s still the lord of the house,” Beth says firmly. “And he’s still my husband.”

Because he is. Because he has to be, because the alternative is too much to bear, and she can’t explain it. The way he looks at her then. The way his eyes dart across her face, hold her in his entire focus, and then he blinks, and it’s almost like he’s - -

 _Disappointed_.

He huffs out a breath, shrugs.

“Doesn’t have to be,” he says, and Beth reels, stares after him, and then the stranger is gone from her side, back down through the corridor, up through the house without her, leaving her in the remains of two families’ wealth alone.

*

For a while, she doesn’t move.

Just stands there in the chill of the empty treasury, Tyler nervous in the corridor outside, trying not to watch her, trying not to linger, but Beth pays him no mind. Rather, Beth watches the flicker of the flame in the shipping lantern the stranger has left behind and she just - -

Listens.

Listens as the stranger re-joins his men in the dining room, audible through the walls. Listens as he sends one back up the stairs to collect the man standing guard of the library. Listens as that door opens, the bright voices of her children cooing a happy goodbye to _Mr. Stanley_ (and something in her chest hitches at that). 

She listens to them leave.

To _him_ leave.

And it’s all it takes for the sounds to shift, for Dean to start to blubber, sobbing at his seat in the dining room. For Benjamin to steal down the stairs and find him, to untie him, to swap quiet, muffled words of concern, and Beth hears Dean dismiss him. Hears the drag of the chair legs across the wooden floor as he stands up.

Hears her lord husband pour himself a drink.

And there it is again.

That twitch of her restless spirit.

It’s with a firm hand that Beth grabs the shipping lantern off the floor, striding out past Tyler with nothing more than a nod of the head, back down the narrow stone corridor, out the study and back through the house, only stopping when she finds herself in the entrance of the dining room, her throat dry and her eyes bright, and there are a million words on the tip of her tongue, a million accusations, a million _truths,_ upturned from beneath all of his lies, but what comes out is:

“Where is my grandmother’s vase?”

Across the room, Dean stops, glass of whiskey halfway up to his mouth, and his eye is swollen shut, his face bruised, lip bloody, and the good wife in Beth should call for Dorothy. The good wife in her should tend to him.

The good wife in her should do a lot of things.

Instead, she stands, watches, expectant, as Dean flounders briefly on the spot, stutters out a few vague, nonsense words while the blood drips from his temple, and Beth just stands a little taller.

“Where is it?” she repeats, and she feels nothing when Dean’s shoulders sag in surrender. He moves before he answers, dropping bodily back into one of the chairs at the dining room table, legs spread inelegantly.

“I sold it,” he says, finally taking a drink. “To the Bishop’s. His wife had always liked it apparently.”

Outside, the rain continues to pour, even if the thunder seems to have quieted, the flashes of lightning snuffed. Continues to shatter against the roof and pour in furious torrents down the windows, and vaguely, Beth wonders after the stranger. If he’s at the next house to loot yet, or if he is instead soon to brave the port and return to his ship. If he can taste freedom the world on his tongue. Feel freedom in his pocket.

If he ever had to worry about things like _this_.

“So I was to go to her house one day and see it there?” she asks Dean, her voice cold, even to her own ears. “Perhaps in her ladies’ apartment?”

“I was going to buy it back before that happened.”

“And if you didn’t?”

Dean huffs out a breath, throws up a hand, shakes his head.

“I would’ve told you it was a duplicate,” he says, flippant, and Beth blinks, wets her lips.

“And if she’d told me otherwise?”

“She wouldn’t have,” he says, surer this time. “It’s what I told them when I sold it to them.”

With that, Dean lifts the glass back to his mouth, has another drink, wincing slightly when the whiskey licks his split lip. There’s a sag to him tonight, a sort of low curve to his shoulders that makes his chest pull in – a poorer posture that Beth has never noticed before – something that good, high class men wouldn’t – _shouldn’t_ – be able to get away with, and she remembers it then. His new money name.

The concession for what she was supposed to get.

What was promised her when she married him.

“My grandfather’s cufflinks,” she starts, watching Dean groan, roll his neck sideways, but she doesn’t give him the chance to tell her where he pawned that particular legacy off to: “The gold Etruscan earrings my aunt left me, the cradle for _my_ daughters. Did you plunder only the things that mattered to me? Or did you deem your own things unnecessary enough to sell too?”

And it’s unfair, knows it is. Has seen the treasury now, knows exactly how much he has lost too, but she looks around this house and she sees his father’s portrait and his grandfather’s grandfather clock, and thinks of the trinkets he dresses his mother in, and she doesn’t care.

“I had a plan,” Dean says sharply, and Beth scoffs, but still, she holds out a hand in invitation. “I was going to - - I mean. I was going to get it all back, but I thought. You know. We could start thinking about good matches for the children too.”

Somewhere above them, Beth hears Dorothy’s quiet voice talking to Emma and Jane. She hears Kenneth tell a joke and Daniel laugh. She hears Benjamin’s tentative footsteps, down the first step, and then the second. Knows if she looked behind her, she’d see him, peering at them over the railing, his mouth small and his eyes too bright, but she can’t bring herself to look. Can’t bring herself to pull her gaze off of Dean, red cheeked and swollen faced in front of her, and she remembers his words, two days ago, and she says:

“Lord Huntington’s son - -”

“Is a good option for Emma,” he finishes, and suddenly Beth can’t hear anything at all, the rush of blood in her ears so loud, so visceral (and god, it sounds like the crash of the ocean) and when she speaks it almost sounds like someone else has said the words.

“She’s eight-years-old.”

It’s at least enough to make Dean stumble. To catch his breath, to finish his drink.

“It’s not just her. The governor has a connection too. You know how he used to be a captain? For the navy?”

That twitch in her spirit.

It moves again, harsher this time, jerks against the bindings she’s so laid upon it.

A spasm of a soul she thought she’d put to rest for good.

“Where’d it all go?” she asks. “The money?”

“He can get Kenneth and Daniel good positions,” Dean tells her, voice louder now, like she’d changed the subject for hard of hearing. “They wouldn’t have to start as junior officers, they could go straight into the petty officer ranks. As quartermasters or cockswains. They’d earn money out there, build good names for themselves before we even had to truly think about their inheritance, and that buys us time, you know? Nobody would have to know.”

“Dean.”

Her voice is harsh this time – doesn’t even sound like her. Isn’t bargaining, isn’t pleading, isn’t coddling. It escapes her in a way she thought it never could, and it shuts him up, at least for a moment.

Beth wets her lips, looks away from him, then back.

“Was it gambling?”

“ _No_ , I wouldn’t - - not after your father.”

He says it quickly, a note of accusation. Like he’s ever needed to remind Beth of what her father did to land her here, and it’s good practice, because her guilt is in a stranglehold, somewhere in the depths of her. She’s too used to trying to subdue it. Instead, her gaze flits over his face, searching for any pearl of truth in the lines of his aging face, and finally just asks it:

“Then what?”

Vaguely, she’s aware that Kenneth has joined Benjamin at the top of the stairs now. That they sit, an audience to the spectacle, and she should go to them, put them to bed, protect them from this new reality, but Beth can’t bring herself to do it. She feels untapped, unsealed, the movements of her spirit no longer just a twitch.

Dean finishes his drink.

“The business had a few bad months. More than months. Maybe years,” Dean says. “I - - the governor offered to help. He gave me a loan and then another one, and then he started asking me to work on certain things for free, as a sort of remittance, since I couldn’t pay him back the money, so we all worked around the clock for those carriages for the city, but I had to pay the staff, so, I asked if the Governor would. Not pay _me_ , but - - but pay _them_ , and he did, you know, but maybe - - maybe he took the deed to the business as collateral, until I could pay him back, and - -”

And he’s crying now, messy, ugly tears dripping down his face, and Beth can’t breathe, can’t find herself in this moment, root herself to the spot. Can feel something pacing inside of her, and it’s all she can to ask him:

“How many loans did you take out?”

The chair squeaks as Dean wobbles forwards, shaking his head, avoiding her look, and it’s all the answer Beth needs too.

“Do you know what happens now?” she asks him. “Without your family’s money?”

His head darts up, and he stares at her, blinking, and it’s all whirring in her head now – a pinwheel of moments, memories, flicking until they blur, until they form one line of continuous, streaming, furious colour. It has been too long, and she feels this too deeply.

“My name was already ruined, you reminded me of that often enough, and your name is worthless without your business. It’s too new – begun with your father and ended with you – we’re both ruined now.”

And he flounders, of course he does. Sputters out vague reckonings of his _plan_ , and Beth realises then that Annie was right.

Love was not enough.

Love would not save her children now. It would not clothe them and feed them and secure them titles and see them well-met in town. It would not see her sons into their lives safely, nor give her daughters choices. It would not keep them out of empty treasuries, their virtues sold to the first man who could take it.

But he didn’t, Beth reminds herself, and it’s his words then – the stranger’s – that echo in Beth’s head.

 _Gutless. He’s the only one in this house who is_.

In the distance, she hears the ocean roar.

“Sell the house,” Beth says, turning on her heel, starting out of the dining room, a plan stitching together in her head. She stops though, twists to look behind her when Dean calls her name. Sweat builds at her fingers around the heavy handle of the lantern, and it’s through the shadow it casts that she sees Dean flounder, but she doesn’t give him a chance to talk.

“You can release the staff. All except for Dorothy. I will pay for her.”

“How?”

“I just will,” Beth tells him, voice tight. “You will go to your mother’s. You will sell the house and you will try to get yourself out of this situation you have gotten yourself into, not for me, but for our children.”

Dean’s sobbing again already, the sounds loud, harsh in the otherwise quiet of the dining room, and he starts shaking his head, over and over and over.

“Mother’s house is not big enough for me and the children.”

But Beth just frowns, face drawing tight as she stares her husband down.

“You have not heard me,” she tells him. “The children will not be going with you. You have already shown that you cannot be trusted with their futures.”

She can see it on his face then – the way he takes a moment to understand what it is she’s saying – but when he does, he surges up to his feet, his own features contorted in anger, and the second he says: “You _can’t_ \- -” the shackles on her spirit finally break.

Striding back towards him, Beth thrusts the shipping lantern in his direction, her face marred in fury.

“I _can_ and I _am_. I will not let you _sell them_ to line your pockets and protect your pride.”

“I would never - - ”

“You sold _me_ to save yourself.”

And his mouth slams shut at that. Dean just stares back at her for a moment, the lick of flame from the lantern illuminating his look, brightening the edges of his blackening bruises, his still bleeding lip, and they’re so close that she sees it, the flutter of judgement that crosses his features.

“Did you - - did you _let him_ \- - is that why he left without anything?”

In a moment, his words blanket her. The accusation held within them – it wraps her up – or - - or perhaps that’s wrong. Perhaps it is not a blanket after all. Perhaps it drips through her like honey, floods her veins and coats her bones, congeals in her joints, hardens there until it’s hard to move, and her spirit roars beneath it all again, and he is the lord of this house, but he has emptied it, and there is enough of her in it still that she feels the loyalty to it, deep in her gut, but then - -

 _Doesn’t have to be_.

*

The things she wills herself not to forget:

The smell of Emma’s hair as she holds her and the brush of Jane’s eyelashes against her temple as she lays feather light kisses at her cheek. The gentleness of them (and god, she was older, she _was_ , but is this what her mother looked at, when she gave Beth away?) The way Daniel plays his piano fingers against her back when she hugs him – uncomfortable, always, with the intimacy of them, despite Beth’s very best efforts – and the tilt of Kenneth’s sharp, brave little chin when Beth tells him what must be done. It’s the sound of Benjamin’s voice, so strong for one so young, as he asks her of the men, tells her of Stanley, then of the way he loves her, when Beth tells him she does too.

“You will listen to your mother,” Beth says, and Benjamin nods, and Beth adds: “And you will look after her.”

He’s surer this time when he nods, but his eyes have gone glassy, and Beth strokes his cheek and promises:

“This won’t be the last we see of each other.”

Please, god, don’t let this be the last.

*

She’s back in her room when Annie finally returns, her burnt orange gown splashed with ale, her hair a mess, her make-up smudged, but her eyes are bright, wounded, furious, and she knows Benjamin has told her, can see it in the way her throat judders when she calls Beth’s name, says:

“Are you - - ” 

“Help me with my corset.”

Beth says the words before Annie can so much as imply another thought, her body twisting on the spot, her mouth opening, closing like a fish, and finally she does close the distance. Gets herself back to Beth’s side, and yanks on the ribbons Beth has been unable to do up herself.

She’d managed to rip off her robe, her nightgown after all, get back into her undergarments, her petticoats without Dorothy’s customary help, but the corset proved impossible. Without question, Annie starts stringing it back up, and Beth sucks in her breath, adjusts her hips, eyelashes fluttering, and it’s best this way, she thinks, not being able to see her sister when she speaks.

“As soon as we are done here, you will pack your things and you will take Benjamin to Gregory’s,” Beth says, and Annie’s hands still on her corset ribbons. 

“What are you - - ”

But Beth won’t let her finish then either. She keeps going. Has to, _always_ , for both of them.

“Take him to Gregory’s tonight. You can take one of Dean’s carriages. Whichever one you want. Tell Gregory he has to legitimise Benjamin at first light. That way, Benjamin can keep you. His title will protect you. As _soon_ as it’s done, you send for my children.”

Annie tries to drop the corset ribbons, and Beth spins to face her sister, grabbing up her hands. Not letting her pull away. Annie’s eyes are already wet, her gaze unfocused, distraught, make-up a mess, but Beth can’t let it rest.

“Beth - -” Annie starts, but Beth just holds up her hand to silence her.

“I’ve already made sure Dorothy has them ready to go in two days. Do not send a letter. Do not waste the time. You will have Benjamin tell his father and then you will send the carriage back to collect them. Dorothy too. I will pay her wage.”

Annie’s already furiously shaking her head, uncomprehending, and Beth clutches her hands a little tighter.

“No,” Annie insists. “We’ll go together now. I will pack my things and we’ll all go together right now.”

“Gregory cannot know until he cannot _say_ no, Annie, you have to understand that. He will have a duty to take in his son’s cousins. To take in _you_. Without Benjamin’s title, he doesn’t have to.”

Her eyes search out Annie’s, desperately willing her to understand, and she knows her sister does, can see it etched into every inch of her face, but Annie keeps shaking her head, says:

“But what about you?”

And that’s the catch, isn’t it, Beth thinks. She exhales, turning around again, gesturing for Annie to finish fixing her corset, and she does, however shaky her hands might be. When she finishes, Beth gestures for her bustle, then her outer petticoats, and Annie layers those over too.

“I’m going to get our name back,” Beth says, and Annie’s hands still once again.

“We don’t need a name.”

“We need more than _this_ ,” Beth tells her, because she knows it now. Maybe wonders if that’s what her aching, twitching spirt has always tried to tell her. “I am going to get it back and I am going to make it _ours._ Make us the new Marks’, first of our new name, because we are not things for the men in our lives to take off or give away or catch dust until they deem us fit to put on again.”

And it’s about her, but it’s about Annie too.

It’s about the fact that Gregory should not be able to only come now, to claim the good son he didn’t raise. Annie should not be left to scrap at security, honour, opportunity, simply because she loved a man (and that love is not enough, not enough, not enough). Beth should have been able to give them more than shelter, but still - - she always wants to give them shelter.

Beth twists, facing Annie again properly, looking at her sister’s features, grief-struck, and Beth grabs at her hands.

“I am going to take care of us,” she promises. “I am going to find the pirate tonight.”

Outside, the storm has remembered itself. Has rolled back it’s thunder, it’s lightning, so it cuts through the quiet, the dark, the _night_. Until nothing else can be heard except the very power of it, and Annie only slips her hands out from under Beth’s to lay them on top. To clutch Beth’s hands to her chest instead.

“Benjamin said this man - - ” she sucks in a breath, can’t finish, and Beth quickly shakes her head, stopping her.

“He could’ve hurt me and he didn’t.”

Could’ve done more than hurt her and he didn’t, Beth thinks. He was honourable with her – not entirely in her bedroom, but when she was at her most vulnerable in that treasury. When he knew exactly how little she had to offer, when he knew exactly what her husband had suggested. And there had been such a _glint_ in his eye, when he spoke to her of - -

Of anything at all.

She lets out a shaky, small breath.

“He will help me. I shall get to his ship tonight, and I will talk to him and he will give me a job,” Beth insists, and she is sure of nothing else, but she is sure of _this_. “I have decided it, and I am still enough of a lady - - he will respect my request.”

Opposite her, Annie just stares back, her forehead creased and her eyes wide, but Beth doesn’t let her speak then either. Instead she pulls her hands from Annie’s and darts over to her jewellery box, emptying it out onto her vanity and starting to shepherd the pieces into a pile for her sister. It’s not much, but it might afford her something of her own, Beth thinks, and then - - just at the last moment, she spots the gleam of her most treasured pearls.

Without a second thought, she slips them into the front of her dress, and points to the rest for Annie.

“Sell it all, and keep what you get for it. _Hide it,_ don’t spend it. Just in case.”

And Annie’s still just staring at her like she’s never seen her before, like the woman who stands before her is a lie, and Beth wants to tell her – wants to say it’s always been within her – drowned in the sea of duty, the need to be the last good woman in their family name, but her mother’s words call back to her –

 _Ask not, want not, hope not, and he will provide_.

And what good had that done for her mother?

What good had that done for Annie?

What good had it done for _her_?

And no, Beth realises. Annie hadn’t been entirely wrong.

Dean’s love was not enough.

But dammit, Beth knew hers _was_.

If he couldn’t provide, _she_ would.

For all of them.

Beth grabs the meagre bag she’s packed and hurries forwards, certain she needs to make haste to catch up to the stranger, stopping only to hold her sister close to her, inhaling every part of her she can. After a moment, she turns, starting for her bedroom door, when Annie calls back.

“Beth!”

She reels back on the spot, turns enough to see Annie staring back at her, twisting her hands in front of herself, her face contorted and her hair a mess. Her eyes dart over Beth’s face, and the air sits pregnant between them for a moment, when suddenly Annie stands a little taller, her face drawing, her body steeling.

“First light. I’ll make sure Benjamin's legitimised. Then I’ll send for your children. I’ll keep them - - _us_ \- - safe.”

She says it firmly, certainly, even though Beth knows it isn’t. Even if they both know that this is all Annie has to give her now, and Beth blinks and she sees her sister, and she blinks and she sees her all those years ago.

Sees her on the doorstep of this very house, her belly swollen below the thick fabric of her dress, her cheeks red, eyes glassy, hair wet with rain water and stuck to her forehead. She remembers the way Annie said her name, and herself just standing there, with nothing of her own to offer except the promise of an _always_ , of a never-never, and she hears it now.

Annie’s _always_. Her never-never, in this very promise.

Beth exhales hoarsely, watches her sister do the same, and she says: “Be safe,” and Annie laughs, and it’s too thick. There’s too much in it. All the same, she nods.

“You too. Write me.”

At least that much she can do. Tilting her head forwards in acknowledgement, Beth turns on her heel, she takes the last breath in her family’s home, and then she’s gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Visual reference guide for this chapter is here!](https://pynkhues.tumblr.com/post/631225431879729152/re-posts-because-they-dont-reaaaaallly-get)
> 
> Thank you to everyone for your comments on the last chapter! I'm still replying to them, I just got a bit overwhelmed with how lovely you all are, haha. Thank you x 1million and I hope you enjoy this chapter!

It’s the wind that carries her.

That builds at her back and bellows her forwards. The cutting line of rain soaking her dress, skin, bones, as she bounds down the streets outside her home; her spirit shaking off the heavy shackles of the Boland name as it leads her. As it rides this furious wind to what, Beth couldn’t hope to know.

Still.

She won’t stumble.

 _Can’t_ , she thinks, hearing the clip of her shoes on the cobbled streets, splashing in shallow puddles of pooling water.

All around her, she catches glimmers of gaslights, hanging outside houses or lighting up rooms beneath thin curtains, catches the peering gaze of children with their upturned noses pressed into glass, clutches of couples sheltering beneath narrow sloped roofs as the pouring rain forms a veil all around them.

An owl ruffles wet feathers in a manor’s awning.

A servant wrestles his master’s spooked, soaked dog.

A carriage passes, the clip-clop-clip-clop of the horse’s hooves like staccato fingers on worn piano keys, and Beth thinks - - Beth thinks - -

Where _is_ he?

Where is the stranger?

Is he in someone else’s house? Perhaps one belonging to a woman she calls a friend, a peer, one of the ladies Beth sits with for tea or court or balls? Is he pulling one of them from their bed, leading them down to the secrets in their house? Pulling the cobwebs from their sharper minds? Ridding them of their good sense? Ridding them of their - -

And perhaps she does stumble then.

More than stumbles.

Rolls her ankle among the cobblestones, enough to make it ache, and Beth gasps, staggering forwards as she tries to regain her footing. Suddenly the weight of her soaked dress, petticoats, undergarments drags at her. The barely-packed bag she has slung across her back like an anchor desperate to find the ground beneath her, and - - and no.

It does not matter what he is doing, she reminds herself, swallowing thickly. Only where he _is_.

Right now, she must do what she told Annie she would.

She must find him, and she must have him grant her employment. Must do that for her sister, her sister’s son, her very own children. Beth sucks in a breath, ignoring the shooting pain in her ankle as she finds her step, hurries forwards again, only to stop.

Where is she _going?_

She’d left in such a flurry of fury, a pulse of purpose, she hadn’t had the sense to think. Had thought she’d just _know_ where to find him, like perhaps he might’ve waited just beyond her door. Like he’d known just how deep this fracture in her porcelain life had been felt, and lingered, like the gentlemen of stories to - -

What? Fix it?

Beth exhales a frustrated breath.

No.

She was done with that – relying on these men to take over, that was the _point_ of this, wasn’t it? 

He was not to wait for her, she was to seek him out.

At the thought, she feels her spirit sing, feels it dance across the floor of her bones, spring free of her body and grip her hand.

She will not find him in these streets.

That much would be impossible, and besides, were it not, what would happen? She’d expose herself, her lord husband’s failings, to her peers? Grant the stranger and his men the chance to dismiss her? Send her home again?

No.

She must get aboard his ship, where he would have no option but to let her stay aboard.

Beth’s fingers flex.

Entwine with her spirit’s, and she has barely had the sense to move when somewhere, loud, Beth hears the roar of the sea.

Before she knows it, she’s walking again. Bypassing middling manors, the elegant new townhouses and the classic older ones. She passes neat, moon-drenched gardens and slick stemmed streetlights. Window after window glows with dim gaslight, and Beth shivers with the weight of her drenched heavy gown, because she knows where she must go.

Knows it, because just as sure as the sound of the sea, is the memory of the smell of it on him.

*

At the harbour, the sea _laps_.

Crashes against the jetties, against the bases of the ships, licking its way into the sky beyond as if to taste the rain. It swallows every drop like it’s been left years wanting, and Beth feels like she can taste every mouthful of it. The rain prising past her lips, coating her crowded teeth.

She inhales a wet breath, her senses desperately seeking anything that isn’t the sight, sound, scent of gushing water, but all she can see is the smudged outlines of maybe things – maybe ships, maybe stalls, maybe carts, maybe large, hauling men. All she can hear beyond the shatter of rain and the crash of sea is the wheeze of the wooden ships, the creak as they bob, and just - - has she ever been here after nightfall?

For it isn’t just the rain that suspends her vision, but the thick, black night. Together, they press against her eyes like purposeful hands, leaving her desperate to pry them away. To force this place to reveal itself to her.

At the thought, Beth swallows thickly, a shiver tearing through her as she starts to move forwards again, water flooding her shoes, clinging her stockings to her legs, her petticoats to her thighs, dress to the rest of her. Her hair is undone from where she’d roughly laid her pins in it, leaving it an icy cape to hold to her neck.

The air tastes different here. _Feels_ different amidst the nestled point of the harbour – any familiarity gone without the glow of daylight, without the market stalls and racing children, the sellers calling out across the fray. Instead, it’s almost foreign. Like the first time she’s ever set foot upon the wooden slats of the ports, and she tries to find the muscle memory of it. To remember tracing these steps only days ago with Annie, tries to remember which boat rests where, which loaded up parcels would have been dropped before this blackened ship – if it was the one carrying tins of coffee beans from the south or the one bringing furs from the north.

It’s no good though, Beth thinks, shielding her eyes from the torrent of rain, staggering towards the edge of the harbour, staring up at the lurching ships, those maybe-men scrambling atop them, oblivious to her below. She can’t see, can’t remember, can hardly think, so how is she supposed to find the one that’s _his_?

Thunder grumbles suddenly across the sky – the sound like the yawn of a lion – and Beth waits for it. Waits for the flash of lightning that follows, like the stretched maw of the beast itself, and when it does, her heart beats fast.

The light briefly exposes the harbour to her. Like the hands pressed to her eyes have finally released her, and her gaze darts quick.

Ship to ship to ship.

Thick-armed sailors hauling heavy, braided ropes.

A teetering mast.

A large sack thrown down onto the wooden port ahead.

In the distance, a sail tears free of its holdings, billowing open, and - - Beth’s stomach lurches - - knocking a man overboard and out into the writhing sea.

Then - -

Darkness.

But oh, the sounds.

Like the sight of it has torn the dust cloth off this musical night, and over the rain Beth can hear the yells of the men, the splash as someone throws something to the sailor taken by the sea. Can hear the wheeze of the ships and the drunkards staggering further down the port. Then - -

Heavy footsteps pound against the wooden jetty behind her, and Beth regains her senses enough to turn, blind again beneath the shroud of night when a body slams into her own.

The weight of it is bruising, claps the air from her chest, and she staggers sideways with the force of it, the sharp pain from her rolled ankle remembering itself. Her leg gives, and the bag slung over her shoulder swings around to her chest, dragging her down, down, down, closer to the edge of the jetty, to where the sea laps up again, kisses her skin, and Beth’s heart rumbles like the thunder had – that yawning, roaring lion – and she’s going to fall, knows she is, and she tries to be ready for it. For the break of frigid, ice water, only - -

Her arm’s grabbed, and she’s jerked roughly back.

It takes her a moment to catch her breath, to reel back through the rain, her wet hair stuck to her features as she turns to see a rough-faced man staring back at her. His lip curled, nose disjointed – like it’s been broken more than once – and Beth shivers, disoriented. She twists in his grip as his hand tightens around her arm.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” the man grunts, and Beth startles, head jerking up again at his harsher tongue. “This ain’t no place for a lady. Not out in this.”

There’s something to his tone, to his voice, that quickens her pulse, and Beth pulls at her arm, her ankle throbbing, tries to free herself from the man’s hold, but he only tightens his grip again. Tightens it so hard it hurts. Until she’s sure she’ll be uncovering thick, blue bruises on her snowy skin in the morn.

Suddenly, Dean’s words from the other day sound loud through her mind. Sung with the voice of her good sense.

_A lady should not be on the streets on her own._

She can feel her heart now beating in her throat, hear the tide of her blood, crashing against the hard shore of her skull, and she stares up at this man, staring down at her through the shatter of this rain, and she thinks - - she thinks - -

_Run._

She’s scrambling then, wet heels working on the slick jetty floor, the waves still lapping up at her, and the man tightens his grip, cusses at her, and everything in her is screaming at her to go. To free herself of this hold, of this moment, of this mission. To escape to the safety of familiar lands, and the man says something to her again, but this time Beth throws her weight back, enough the man stumbles, yells something at her that sounds like _help you_ , but Beth can’t hear him. She throws herself back again, and this time the man’s grip breaks, and she spins, scrambling back down the jetty to the harbour, fleeing faster, faster, legs burning, ankle aching, the frigid sea air whipping past her cheeks, through her stinging chest, but she doesn’t stop.

From the corner of her vision, she sees the ships bob and sailors stare, sees another flash of lightning tear the sky in two, sees it light up sand bags and coils of rope and produce lost to the wild winds, but still she doesn’t stop. Doesn’t stop until she’s off the jetty, back into the row of crowded little buildings just off the harbour, hands scrambling for shelter, safety, _something_ , and finally finding it within a narrow alley.

She stumbles forwards, collapsing back into the hard wall of one of the buildings bracketing the alley.

There’s enough of an awning that she’s briefly sheltered from the pouring rain, and Beth scrapes a heel along the stones, panting wildly, raising a trembling hand to her chest, trying to centre herself, trying to calm herself, trying to forget the man’s hard grip on her, and - - and she can’t breathe. She can’t - - she needs to _breathe._ She drops her head, sucking in wet, shallow gasps, feeling the frigid hang of her drenched hair around her face, the cool touch of it, and she holds her bag a little tighter. _She’s okay. She’s safe. She’s - - She has no idea what she’s doing._

The realisation is enough to make her laugh, the sound wet and empty even to her own ears, and she blinks hard, feels the heavy wetness of her lashes, and she’s not sure if it’s for the weather or tears. She’s not sure if it matters.

 _Foolish_ , she thinks. This entire task has been foolish. What business did she have pursuing this? This is not who she was - - _is_. She is the lady daughter of a good house, no matter what the circumstances, and this was - - all of this was - -

She sucks in a wobbly breath, blinking back what really are tears this time, lifting her head enough to let it drop to the brick wall behind her head.

She should go home. Take the children and go with Annie to Lord Rabe’s.

Or - -

No.

She should be a better wife. Stay with her lord husband. Figure out a way through this at his side.

The thought makes her rub furiously at her chest, her arm twitching and she can still feel the man’s hold on her. Feel the harsh way he had grabbed her arm to stop her falling, and suddenly the memory of the stranger reaching for her finds her instead. The way he’d stopped her stumbling just outside the treasury, and she blinks, lips parting. Something in her sparking warm, but that’s - -

She glowers, gaze fixing on the cold brick wall on the opposite side of the narrow alley, shaking out her twitching arm.

They’d both been a threat to her, had they not? Or - - or perhaps neither had been. The stranger had been dignified and practically courteous in Dean’s empty treasury, and she rather thinks in hindsight that the man at the jetty _had_ perhaps been trying to help her, but…

But stranger men do not touch ladies of her station.

As soon as the thought finds her, her breath shortens again.

Had unfamiliar men ever grabbed at her like that before? She can not recall a moment as such. Cannot remember a time a man not her father, nor husband, nor sons have truly touched her before at all.

 _Foolish_ , she thinks again, exhaling harshly. What does that matter now? The Boland name will fast be a memory, and the Marks name is already a ghost, so what does that make her? A lady of nothing, protected by nothing, untouched only so much as the safety of the past has allowed.

The thought splinters inside her. Curls her toes.

She’s saved from her thoughts by a door opening in the distance and a flood of sound pouring out. Bawdy songs of nights on the town, shanties at sea. The yells of drunk sailors, sheltering from the storm, and she must be near the tavern, she thinks. Must be close to where many nights begin and end, and before she knows it, her mind falls on Annie again, and is this what she felt?

When she slipped out of the Boland house at night? Nameless and alone?

No, surely not now, but perhaps those first times. When she was young, her cheeks still flush with naivety, but –

Beth’s gaze slips up the alley. Takes in the dark haunt of it, the dusty corridor. The bricks are dressed with rough dents and green fuzzing moss, splotches of white salt residue from the sea. Somewhere further up, a woman laughs, slipping down into the alley before her only to be chased by a smiling man who grips her hand, slings her back out into the rain to kiss her, swallowing her bright laughter, and - -

And perhaps that is more the nights Annie had, Beth thinks.

Nameless but not so lonely.

(But then, perhaps Beth has been lonely with the name too).

She lowers trembling hands to the folds of her dress, twisting it just so, until water falls from the fabric, feels her ankle throb beneath her, her chest shiver with the cold, and - - and she really should go back.

She’s the one who has been naïve, she thinks, hearing the drip of her skirts beneath her on the filthy floor of the alley. Naïve to think she could find the stranger in this bleak night, naïve to think he’d let her. Naïve to think she could do any of this at all.

Beth lets her eyes slip shut, wets her lips, tastes the sea air on them, and - -

Footsteps sound.

Closer and closer, and it’s enough to cut through Beth’s thoughts, make her head jerk up, eyes searching and her breath catching as she sees a young man duck down the alley and walk briskly up the narrow corridor towards her.

Or - -

Barely a man.

More of a boy really, Beth thinks. He can’t be any older than Annie, with his boyish cheeks and big, watery-blue eyes, with the slightly gormless look on his face that reminds Beth rather of a young hare. Her heart quickens as he gets closer, hearing the way his step slows.

Beth clears her throat, stands up a little taller, her grip tightening on her bag, and she blinks when the boy looks her over, his gaze briefly settling on her chest, his cheeks pinking and his mouth opening, before he seems to shake himself out of it. He reaches a hand for the unusual, yet elegant wicker top hat that sits upon his head, tilting it towards her in greeting as he moves past her.

“M’lady,” he says, voice deeper than she expected for his boyish look, and a little rough, and Beth curtseys awkwardly back with her throbbing ankle and soaking dress, gaze drifting to where he pushes the hat back on his head as he passes, a hat - - 

Beth blinks.

A hat that isn’t _his_.

Her lips part, wet lashes matting, but before she can say a thing, the boy is gone. Slipped out the other end of the alley as easily and elegantly as he’d slipped in, and Beth picks up her skirts and darts forwards, just enough to see him steer down the side of the buildings, careful to remain under the awnings to avoid the rain.

Perhaps she is being silly, she thinks. It’s just a hat, after all, and perhaps it was his, but - - no.

She’s sure of it.

She knows that hat too well.

Remembers Lady Karen’s insistence on the custom make of it for her lord husband. Remembers how she’d paid the Wilson Brothers – the town’s finest milliners – a small fortune for it. How proud she’d been of the design (something she’d insisted was her own, but Beth had known it wasn’t. Seen it in some of the periodicals from Paris that had arrived on one of the finer ships). So proud she’d had the trimming completed in her own family’s signature colours instead of that of her lord husband’s, a quiet act of ownership that her husband had been oblivious to, but had all the women in town chattering for weeks.

And if the hat belonged to Lady Karen’s lord husband, then - -

_He’s one of them._

It’s like a flint to the kindling of her.

The dwindling fire – put out by this heavy rain – relit, and Beth’s heart pounds in fear and failure no longer. She watches as the man lopes through the darkness, ducking beneath window frames and avoiding the light, slipping nearer and nearer to the tavern in the distance.

Beth watches as he knocks on the cook’s door.

Watches as it springs open.

Watches him be greeted, shepherded in.

Watches him slip inside.

And Beth should go home, for she has felt this danger, seen this night, but the deeper she searches, wishing for the flower of her blossoming doubt - - somehow all she finds is the deep caught roots of her certainty.

*

The window’s ajar.

Not much more than a finger’s width, but it’s enough to let the smoke from the cookers billow out into the night sky. To tangle up with the fleeting, fluttering midnight insects and disperse in the slowing rain. It’s all Beth can really see now that she’s crept her way forwards in the boy’s shadow. Followed the path of his sprightly step to the back of the tavern, but still - - not quite inside. Perhaps she’s not quite fool enough for that.

Beth presses herself back into the wall, reaching up onto her tiptoes with the hopes of peering through the smoking window, but alas. She’s not quite tall enough. She calls on her other senses instead – lets her mouth hang open to swallow the taste of mulled wine and rum, halibut, cornbread, sugar cakes. Let’s her ears prick and take in the sounds of the men inside; the cooks at work in the kitchen behind her, but the men beyond too. The ones drying themselves at fireside tables, the ones singing and thrumming and laughing too. There’s a clash of chatter, the scrape of chair legs on wooden floors, something metal is dropped and not caught before it rolls out of reach.

Beth swallows, shivers, skirts her soaked body back against the wall again and edges sideways to the next window, and then the next, and it is only at the fourth – half around the tavern’s corner – that Beth hears the newly familiar scratch of the boy’s voice again.

“And another. I told you, the captain wants a dozen this time.”

“Twelve?”

It’s a woman’s voice then. Something older, rougher, and Beth’s chest grips in anticipation as she leans a little closer, listening as the other woman scoffs in disbelief.

“If Rio wanted twelve, he should’ve written ahead. He’s lucky I can spare the eight.”

Suddenly, something thumps hard – an oven door being slammed, or something heavy hitting the floor – Beth can’t quite tell. Just knows it’s enough to startle her. To leave her sparking nerves catching. She inhales, only to shiver as a gale blows through her; the wind cool on its own, but growing icy when pressing her wet gown to her chest. Balling her hands into fists to try and warm her fingers, Beth presses a little closer to the window, straining to hear.

“I only bring the order,” the boy says. “You know how this goes, St. Claire. He makes the list, I bring it, and the men who’ll pick it up later will make sure it _all_ goes aboard.”

There’s a beat of quiet, and Beth feels something in her catch uneasy, feeling the weight of their silence, before:

“Are you threatening me, boy?”

The words are curt, terse, and the boy scoffs.

“I’m just - -

“Don’t think yourself big, just because you’ve got his mark on you,” she hisses, voice taut, and Beth blinks, feels something in her sharpen, her spirit perking up in her chest. “I worked with Rio long before you did, and I will long after someone tosses your bonny ass overboard and makes fish food of you. He might tell you what to do, but he don’t tell me. He can make his order, but he’ll get what he’s given. He wants more than what I got on hand, last I knew, _he_ knew how to write.”

There’s a rustling in the kitchen, and then a throat clears. Shoes scuff across dusty floors, and Beth can’t explain it – the fresh wave of adrenaline running clean through her veins. The woman speaks so firmly, so - - _powerfully_ \- - to the boy, and Beth feels the rush anew.

“However many you can spare then,” the boy says after a moment, voice slower, lower, chided. “And whatever smoked meat you have too. Anything that’ll travel tonight, like - - ”

“Flour, cheeses, spices. This I know. He doesn’t need to send me Ruby’s list. What he needs to send me is _notice_. I can’t provide if I don’t know when he needs these things.”

The quiet hangs for a moment, and Beth lingers, breath caught, so as not to miss a word, but none come, and when they do, the boy’s voice is so quiet she has to strain as to hear it:

“You know why he couldn’t. Not so long as you’re _here_.”

Then, another moment:

“He’d have you aboard again, if you wished it.”

Whatever the woman might say in reply, Beth couldn’t hope to hear. A grumble of thunder roars above, and the sky opens up once more. The dwindling rain suddenly cascades, shattering across the floor of the harbour and Beth exhales, watching the torrent of it as a few men stumble away from their ships towards the firmer shore.

When her ears have finally adjusted once more to the room at her back, it’s only in time to hear the retreating steps of one of the figures, and Beth hurries back, twisting around the side of the tavern in time to see the cook’s door spring back open and the boy step out. He adjusts his hat in the doorway, and Beth has the vague thought of Lady Karen’s horror at knowing her lord husband’s hat was out in this weather, atop a pirate’s head, but the thought leaves her as the young man steps out into the elements.

She has only moments then to make a decision – to follow him and appeal to his good sense, to leave her fate in the hands of another man, or - -

Beth’s gaze skirts sideways, back to the still-ajar cook’s door, and she remembers the firmness of the woman’s voice, and before she can think another thing of it, Beth darts forwards, slipping into the door whence the boy came.

*

It’s the warmth that finds her first.

The heat of the ovens permeating the enclosed space so thoroughly it’s like stepping beneath the sun’s generous rays, and for a moment, Beth just breathes. Inhales deep enough she feels the heat fill her mouth, pour down her throat, pool in her aching lungs. It’s a honey-lipped sort of kiss, a compassionate embrace for her frigid body, enough to penetrate the soaked layers of her gown and curl the ends of her still-dripping hair.

While the space is dark and long, ill-lit with meagre gaslights, it also roars with life. The three ovens set back into the wall are in good use. Atop the stove, rich-smelling gravies full of mead and onion, thyme and rosemary boil, while within the oven’s chambers, the legs, shoulders, bellies of animal’s brown. Potatoes, pumpkins, beets, turnips sprawl in open mass across the countertops, and two cooks dart between them all, chopping and slicing and tossing, so swept up in their task they seem not to see her.

Beth is grateful for it. Grateful for the moment of warmth, of peace, at least. Raising a hand, she pushes wet hair from her forehead, smoothing it back as the smell of earthy vegetables and spitting pig fat finds her nose. It’s enough to make her stomach turn – in hunger or revulsion, Beth can’t tell – and she moves to step forwards in distraction as much as purpose, only to halt when a familiar voice finds her ear.

“I hope you excuse any impropriety, my lady, but I think you might be lost.”

Jerking her head around, Beth casts her eyes across the bustle of the kitchen, only to promptly land on a woman, striding across the kitchen towards her. She’s a firm thing somehow, despite being so slight. Silver haired, a plain, periwinkle-coloured dress adorning her below a dirty apron. Proud, set back shoulders. Her step is direct, face a little gaunt, and Beth must be an unusual presence in a place like this, but the woman somehow looks unbothered. This must be St. Claire – the woman who she’d just overheard speaking to the pirate – Beth thinks.

Across the room, one of the cook’s looks back at her curiously, following St. Claire’s attention, but doesn’t deviate from her task – pulling a splattering, spitting sheep’s leg from the oven – and Beth is grateful for that too, for she cannot be distracted now. Not from what she must do.

 _This is it_ , she thinks, squaring her shoulders, lifting her chin, her nose, imbuing her words with as much ladylike authority as she can muster.

“I need to get aboard a ship.”

The words land in the room like a tossed ball, bouncing down the corridor of the kitchen, making the other cook and one of the maid’s glance over too, catching the order, and one of them, Beth doesn’t know who, even _laughs_. Beth blinks, bites back her flush as she shifts her weight, stands a little taller. Tries not to peel her eyes away from where St. Claire arches an eyebrow back at her, her gaze skirting over Beth’s form in return – taking in the drowned look of her, the elegant cut and cloth of her dress, the bag Beth clutches to her chest, her pale, shivering hands – before glancing back up to meet her gaze.

“Does this ship have a name?” she asks, goading more than curious, and Beth just stares back at her, lips parting, eyes blinking rapidly, mind sifting uselessly through memories to pull up any that might make sense.

Behind them, one cook yells at the other, and the maid ducks around to the stove, pulling open the door of one of the other oven’s to allow the smoke to billow out, and it’s enough to fill the room briefly. A furious torrent of grey. Beth swallows thickly, tasting a lie forming on her tongue.

“Not one I can speak so publicly,” she says finally. “But it is the ship you are supplying tonight.”

St. Claire squints a little at her (or perhaps that’s just the smoke), opens her mouth to reply, but before she has the chance, Beth cuts her off. 

“You’re working for them, aren’t you?” she lowers her voice conspiratorially, steps closer. “The pirates?”

The kitchen might hum with life, but she’s met only with St. Claire’s stony silence, the woman tilting her head to the side, weighing her in the moment, and Beth shifts her weight again, only to be reminded of her throbbing ankle. She adjusts instead. Tries to balance herself better on her uninjured leg as she tries to keep her gaze steady on the other woman. The lack of instantaneous reply is enough to make Beth waver, uncertain suddenly in her own conviction, and before she can stop herself, she asks: 

“Are you not supplying them with food for their travels? Drink?”

And at least this time, St. Claire nods.

“I am. So?”

The words are so clipped, said so shortly, that Beth reels back, blinks rapidly in response, gaze darting over the other woman’s hard features.

“So I want you to get me aboard!”

Her tone is enough to make St. Claire huff, shaking her head as she walks past Beth, not stopping to grace her with an answer. Instead, she reaches for a cabinet behind her, tugging it open to pull out a few large, burlap sacks and then stepping sideways to grab two bags of coffee, then tins of spices – caraway and cassia, cloves and mace and nutmeg from the pantry too.

For a moment, all Beth can do is watch her, her spirit stunned into silence by St. Claire’s simple lack of acknowledgement, and when the other woman finally does speak, it’s only to cut Beth off.

“I’m sorry, my lady, but I am not in the business of helping runaways get themselves into trouble, so - - ”

“It’s not like that,” Beth insists quickly, because it’s _not_ , watching as St. Claire walks by her again, only this time, Beth follows her deeper into the kitchen.

“It’s not?”

“No.”

“What’s it like then?”

Beth opens her mouth again, but no words dance across her tongue, slip from between her parted lips. How could they? How could she even begin to explain to this woman what’s happened to her tonight? To explain the way she has been unmade by a man who was supposed to _make_ her. To explain the loss of each of her children’s tomorrows, their places in good and decent society. The robbery of their choices.

There is no way to explain it, but St. Claire hears only silence, not loss, and so she snorts, twisting around enough to call out to one of the maids for some of the good cheese. It smarts like a slap because Beth knows a dismissal when she hears one. Somewhere in her, her spirit twitches, then leans heavy.

“I was robbed tonight,” Beth says after a moment, wetting her lips, her throat hoarse. She clutches at her bag, ignoring the way one of the cook’s eyes darts to take her in. “Of something important. Something I want back. One of the men aboard that ship, he - - ”

He what?

Spared her?

Showed her what her lord husband was?

 _Looked_ at her like - -

Like he saw something.

The memory of that much is stark. Enough to make her cheeks flush, the way he’d seemed almost impressed with her in the corridor, then softened his sharp features for her in the treasury, she had felt - - not _safe_ with him, of course not safe, but - -

She had felt something.

Like a promise uttered in a foreign tongue.

The weight of the other woman’s gaze is heavy on her anew, and Beth can feel it starkly. Can feel the way she takes her in. The way she traces the lines of Beth’s proud shoulders, her firm jaw, but then perhaps the way she sees beneath it too, which is likely no hard feat. No act to be proud of finds a society lady in a tavern kitchen at any time of day, let alone soaked to the bone, with nothing but a small bag to cling to, shed of her fineries, of her good graces. It’s enough to make St. Claire’s look suddenly shift into something knowing, and Beth prepares herself for what, she doesn’t know, but certainly not for:

“The captain is a handsome man.”

Her gaze snaps to the other woman, a furious blush erupting across her chest, her cheeks, because - - _no_ , that is - - she had not even - -

Beth splutters, head jerking, hand twitching, and she hates that St. Claire only grins.

“No, that’s not - - ” Beth flounders, gesturing out with her free hand, suddenly feeling the weight of her wedding ring and letting it sink her like an anchor. “I am married. A mother. A - - a _lady,_ and he is a - - a _pirate_.”

St. Claire gives her an amused look at that, turning only to thank the maid, who’s appeared at her side with an armful of hardened cheeses, wrapped in calico. Without any fanfare, St. Claire piles them all into one of the other bags with an easy hand. Grateful for the reprieve, Beth sucks in a breath, willing the flush from her cheeks, because there is so little reason for it. It’s not like she didn’t understand the stranger (the captain?) to be a handsome man, but that had not a thing to do with Beth’s predicament. She sniffs a little, adjusts her weight to ease off her swollen ankle, and is relieved more than anything when St. Claire finishes loading up her bag with the wrapped cheeses and turns once more, jerking her head this time for Beth to follow.

“And say I did see you aboard,” St. Claire says suddenly. “How would you intend to pay for your passage, my lady? I do not work without charge, after all.”

It’s enough to make Beth blink, to clear her head of any thought of the stranger, as her spirit roars to life again inside her, because is St. Claire really offering? Has she convinced her somehow?

Beth picks up her step, promptly following the other woman down the length of the kitchen, stopping only when St. Claire does before another pantry to pull out cans of milk and bags of flour.

“I have nothing upon me now,” Beth says. “But I shall send you what you wish. Anything you can name. Say it and I will get it to you.”

“I have no interest in debts. I mean no disrespect, but I have seen too many go unpaid in my lifetime.”

Dipping low, St. Claire rifles through the bottom of the pantry to pull out a bag of sugar, shoving it into one of her burlap sacks, and Beth wets her lips, thinking it over. She has her pearls of course, dipped into the waist of her dress, but she’d intended that as a form of payment for the stranger. Something he’d perhaps find of value to pay for her initial boarding. Before she could start earning for him. She’d brought little else. Her bag full not of riches, but necessities and sentimentalities – a portrait of her children, soap, ribbons to tie her hair back, paper to write Annie with.

She swallows thickly, watching St. Claire pack the bags.

“Please,” Beth says. “I am a woman of my word. I will send you whatever you desire once I have it. I’m not above begging. I wish I were, but I’m not. I need to get aboard that ship.”

There must be something desperate enough in her tone, for St. Claire briefly pauses in her ministrations. She looks back up at her, her face careful, considering, as she takes in Beth’s earnest face.

“What was taken from you?”

 _Everything_ , Beth thinks. But she can’t say it. Like if the words pass her lips, they’ll be true. Set in stone. Her children left to squandered futures.

“Not above begging, but not without secrets,” St. Claire says wryly, and Beth flushes again, but tilts her chin up a little proudly, sucking in a breath, and is left only to watch as the older woman clambers up off the floor, her gaze traversing Beth’s body carefully as she does, and she fixes, shifts her weight, before letting her gaze finally drift back up to Beth’s.

“You wear your wealth too well, my lady.”

The words make Beth blink, looking back at St. Claire who waits only long enough for Beth to meet her gaze before she nods down at Beth’s hand.

“I’ll take that as payment.”

It’s sudden then.

The memory of her wedding day. The cool, damp air of the chapel, the weight of her embellished silk gown, the scent of orange blossoms everywhere – pointed in their meaning of chastity – potent enough she had smelt them long after the bouquet was free of her hands, when Dean had settled heavily atop her late that night and ensured those flowers could never be held to her again.

The memory of this ring, being slid upon her delicate finger. Of it pinching her as she clenched her hands into fists while he pushed roughly into her, ignoring the pain of that first time. Of her looking at it afterwards while Dean snored at her shoulder, and thinking - -

Thinking she’d grow to like it.

“It was his grandmother’s,” Beth says quietly now, and St. Claire only looks back.

“How much do you hate him?”

*

The wood whines as St. Claire leverages the top of the empty barrel off with her knife.

It hits the floor of the rum cellar with a clang, and when St. Claire gestures her over, Beth steps tentatively forwards.

St. Claire had moved quickly after Beth had given her the ring, leaving behind the bags of cheese, flour, spices, moving swiftly through the kitchens before leading Beth to this very room. A long, dank cellar that dripped with the ongoing storm. The room itself had little else in it beyond the barrels of rum, puncheons and pipe casks that lined the wall. Enormous, dark wood things that stacked atop one another in wooden frames, oddly ominous in their scope.

“Come along now,” St. Clair says, and Beth’s attention snaps back to the other woman. “We don’t have time to waste. They won’t stay long. Not here. Not tonight. If you want to do this, we must make haste.”

With that, St. Clair heaves the barrel sideways onto the floor, letting the remnants of undrunk rum leak out onto the stone floor. She does her best to tilt it up, to get out as much as she can, before dropping the thing back down, wiping her hands on her apron and gesturing Beth to it, and - -

Surely she cannot mean for Beth to get _inside_ it?

She flails briefly, but before she can so much as splutter the question out, St. Clair rolls her eyes, and gestures once more.

“The captain has ordered twelve to go aboard. He won’t check ‘em until they anchor-up and sail out. I’ll make sure the boys know the barrel with you in it needs to be drunk first, so they’ll open this up and find you before the night is through. Trust me, as soon as they’re sailing again, they’ll be drinking. You won’t be left waiting too long.”

The plan is offered bluntly, the words spoken loud in the chilly cellar, warping almost beneath the shatter of rain outside and the bustle of the kitchens mere feet away, and Beth lets her focus slide from St. Claire’s plain face to the filthy inside of the barrel. The walls of it are still dripping, the sediment and trub in the bottom like silt in a river. It’s enough to turn Beth’s stomach, to make her still-shivering skin itch, but before she can allow her reservations to speak, she slips off her shoes, piling them onto the top of her bag and limps over.

 _This is what she wants_ , she reminds herself.

_No._

What she _needs_.

She sucks in a breath.

Getting into the barrel is no easy feat, and Beth has to half-lie on the floor, her sodden skirts thick around her as she shimmies down into the thing, the wood wheezing as the metal brackets hold firm. The smell of liquor is almost overwhelming, and Beth shudders, feeling it soak into her clothes, her hair, stick to her aching feet through her stockings, but she nods once she’s in all the same, letting St. Claire heave the barrel back up to a standing position.

She shifts back once she’s upright, adjusting her bottom at the base of the barrel, ignoring the pinch of her corset and the throb of her ankle as she tries to make herself as comfortable as possible. Her bag is a heavy weight on her lap, and Beth lifts it enough to drop her shoes beneath it. Feels them sink into the folds of her gown, when St. Claire comes to loom above her again and offers her the handle of a knife.

It’s a beautiful thing. Steel, with an ornately designed handle – a small engraved base with a blank coat of arms at the centre, a filigree style top giving way to the blade itself. Still – Beth stares at it, her mouth dry, briefly speechless, before she looks up at St. Claire.

“What are you - - ” she starts, but before she can finish, St. Claire interrupts her. 

“They’re bringing these barrels aboard to drink and be merry,” she says firmly, slowly, as if to make sure Beth truly hears her. “They open it and find you, they might find a new way to be merry.”

The words pulse in the space between them, and Beth feels her ribs strain against her corset, feels herself struggle to take in a deeper breath, heart pulsing rapidly in the trappings of her chest, because - - no, it’s not that the thought hadn’t occurred to her. Not that she hadn’t thought it when the man at the harbour had pulled on her, when she’d gasped for air in the alley, but - -

“With luck and good fortune, you will not have to use it,” St. Claire adds quickly, like she’s seen Beth’s rising panic. “But at least it is something.”

St. Claire’s gaze softens before it firms again, and it’s all Beth can do to stare at the other woman. To take in the way her dark eyes linger, steady on Beth, to see the way she reaches down to grip Beth’s hand, uncurl her fingers, press the cool metal handle of the knife into it. The weight of it in her hands is like nothing Beth has ever felt, and her heart bobs like a wooden buoy in the sea of her. The idea of using it causes something in her to tighten, makes her spirit shrink, only then she blinks, and she sees him again.

Sees the stranger.

Remembers that moment in the treasury, remembers the way he’d shaken his head at her and said _yeah, that ain’t somethin’ you gotta worry about with me._

The memory is like a salve.

Like a gift, and when she blinks again, she sees only her cold, pale fingers, naked somehow, without her wedding ring, half-entwined with St. Claire’s around the handle of the knife, shadowed by the distorted light.

“He had his chance to do what he wanted,” Beth tells their hands. Tells the knife. “And he chose - - ”

The words dry in her throat.

Dignity?

No. He’d been to honest for that.

Kindness?

No. He’d been to honest for that too, and perhaps that was her answer.

He hadn’t been anything but truthful, at least in that moment, but before Beth can say as much, St. Claire has tightened her hand around Beth’s even more, forcing her to grip the handle of the blade even tighter.

“Do not confuse an act of chivalry for a chivalrous man,” she tells her, her voice hard, and Beth blinks, finally looking up at the other woman again, her chest lurching. “He is what he is, and you shouldn’t forget it. God knows he won’t forget what _you_ are.”

Wetting her lips, Beth stares up at St. Claire, and the question forms in her mind before she can stop it. What won’t the captain forget? What does he see when he looks at Beth? What does _she_ see? She exhales harshly, the scent of rum creeping back up to her nose, and she opens her mouth to say something, anything, only they’re interrupted by a voice from the kitchen.

“Governor!”

It’s St. Claire who jerks her head around, releasing Beth’s hand quickly and practically leaping towards the barrel lid. Beth scrambles up in the barrel herself, peering over the top to try and see the open door of the cellar, searching out any glimpse of Turner, heart pounding in her throat, because if it’s the Governor - - if he sees her here - -

“ _Get down_ ,” St. Claire bites, and Beth sinks low in the barrel, toes curling as St. Claire fits the lid over the top, submerging her in a thick, bleak darkness as heavy steps sound down the corridor, and then - -

The unmistakable voice of Governor Turner.

“Mrs. Thatcher,” he says, and his voice is warm, but it’s almost too warm, Beth thinks, fingers clenching around the knife in her hands. Too hot. Like a flame ready to burn. “It’s been too long.”

“Always is,” St. Claire replies, weighing down the lid of the barrel, ensuring the top is well-fit. “And it’s Mrs. St. Claire now.”

“Oh? I hadn’t realised you’d married again.”

There’s something sharp in the moment then, and Beth blinks rapidly, her eyes adjusting to the darkness within the barrel. The feel of the rum is sticky at the back of her head, clinging to her hair, drawing her back, and Beth lets her eyelashes flutter shut, trying to school her twisting thoughts. She feels cold all of a sudden, a shiver trembling through her, her ankle throbbing all over again as a tension wrings her body tight, the knowledge that the Governor stands mere feet away enough to stutter her heart.

If he finds her, this will all be over.

If he finds her, he will not hold his tongue.

Everyone will know of her disgrace.

The shame of her trying to flee it.

She flushes red hot, hand growing clammy around the knife.

“I’d ask to what I owe the pleasure, but I won’t insult us both,” St. Claire says, and then there’s the sound of her footsteps, striding forwards. The drag of another barrel across the floor. A distraction. A ruse. “So instead I’ll answer before you even ask. No. I don’t know why he’s here, and I don’t know where he is.”

For a moment, all Beth can hear is the bustle of the kitchen in the distance – the clatter of pans and the spit of oil, the way the cook maid sings some sweeter tune, a spring to her ungracious step. Then:

Another step.

The slow draw of good shoes on dusty stone floors.

The melodic, deep sound of Governor Turner’s laugh.

“Oh, come on now, I thought you weren’t going to insult us both? You can’t tell me he hasn’t made an order.”

“I honestly couldn’t say,” St. Claire replies. “A lot of orders have come through tonight. More than half the ships are leaving the harbour over the next few days. A lot of long voyages ahead. They’re all starting to think seriously about their supplies, and I still offer the best rates, despite your efforts to tax me out of business.”

It’s a low jab, and one that Governor Turner seems to ignore.

“And yet you knew he was here?”

It’s offered casually, near effortlessly, and it’s enough to make Beth’s toes curl, her fingers tremor. Turner’s single-minded focus sits strangely in the moment of it, speaks of a greater intent, and did he know him, Beth wonders? The stranger?

“You know as well as I that word of the sea travels quick on the harbours,” St. Claire replies easily. “Particularly in places like this, where rum loosens lips.”

As if on a stage cue, a door pushes open in the distance, and a torrent of sound pours through – men laughing, careening about, legless with their liquoring, bright music, the scrape of wooden chair legs. It’s enough to fill even Beth’s head for the minute of it, so buoyant and penetrating, but it does little to move the Governor. 

“He’s robbed eight houses tonight, Frances,” he bites suddenly, and Beth’s eyes snap back open at the sudden shift. “That’s the man you’d still call your captain? Who you’d provide and cover for? These are good houses he’s raiding. Good _people_.”

 _Eight houses_.

Her house had been the fifth, the stranger – captain? – had told her that much, and she’d seen enough evidence to know who some of the others were – Lady Karen’s, Lady Asmita’s, Lord Huntington’s. All wealthy, well-established houses, but good? Beth bites her lip, teetering in her uncertainty. 

St. Claire though doesn’t so much as ask, a sigh expounding from her lips. Another barrel scrapes across the floor.

“I only ever called you captain, James. I wasn’t a part of what happened on the Valiant. I’m shoreside, aren’t I? In _your_ town. At _your_ harbour. I haven’t spoken to him – to anyone aboard – in years.”

Beth swallows thickly, adjusts a little lower in the barrel, feels the scrape of sticky wood at her back, smells the thick scent of rum and rainwater, and she just wants Turner to _leave._ Wishes he’d vanish from this place, return back to whence he came, let her escape, let her - -

“He’s kidnapped a woman too. Lord Boland’s wife. I’ve had the man in my ear, he’s distraught.”

And there it is again.

The roar of the sea.

The crash of waves against the harbour, the lap of it against the boat keels, the way it licks up towards the rain, and it’s all Beth can hear, her toes scratching into the base of the barrel so hard the skin breaks and bleeds.

How quickly had Dean fled to Turner?

How quickly had he sought her capture and return to him?

Something sparks so hot, so furious in her that her hands tremble around the knife still in her hands. She palms it roughly, trying to quell her temper.

“Kidnapped?” St. Claire asks, voice loaded with false surprise. “That seems unlike him.”

“Or perhaps you just never knew him after all. Didn’t see him for what he was, like I did.”

“You were the captain for a reason.”

The line seems to placate the governor in a way Beth’s never heard before, the tone to his voice easing, the energy outside of the barrel losing some of it’s blistering tension. There’s quiet again, and Beth’s still trying to stimmy her frayed nerves when Turner speaks again.

“You will send word, of course,” he allows. “If you see him. Or her.”

It’s not a question, but St. Claire doesn’t raise to the bait.

“From this very moment.”

He doesn’t remain long after that. His heavy footsteps sounding back out across the long cellar, a skip to his step as he bounds up the stairs back into the kitchens, then through and out into the stormy night. Beth lets out a shaky breath, releasing the knife only to dig her nails into the side of the bag on her lap, relief catching in her throat, and it’s only then that St Claire steps back towards her barrel. 

“I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into, Lady Boland,” she whispers, and god, Beth hopes so too.

*

The smell of rum is potent.

Crawls up her nose as it gloms to her skin. The dregs of it in the bottom of the barrel soaking through her stockings, through the many layers of her already-wet gown, and Beth shifts her weight, uncomfortable. Her muddied shoes sinking into the fabric between her legs, beneath the weight of her drenched bag, and not for the first time, she thinks of the meagre belongings she’d packed into it, wonders if the small, rolled portrait of her children might be ruined. Beth swallows, resting back into the hard, sticky side of the barrel. 

She’d been picked up at least – a stranger feeling – the boy from before and another – someone in possession of a bright, good-humoured voice who she’d only realised was the _Stanley_ who’d been with her children when the boy (Eddie, she now knows his name is), had stropped at him over a lack of shine on some stolen trinket. Had been picked up and taken along with the rest of the barrels and the parcels St. Claire had packed, and loaded onto what Beth can only guess is a jolly boat of some sort.

It’s almost a comfort – to hear the rain still pelting down atop her barrel – and then just as quickly, almost a thrill – to feel the bob of the sea beneath her as she’s ferried down onto the thing, and then - -

Then it just seems to be a waiting game.

Eddie and Stanley seem inclined to bickering in good-nature – about men aboard, about women, or rather, _a_ woman when it comes to Stanley, about which of the Bahamian Islands are better – Eleuthera, Samana Cays, Paradise, and Beth swallows, absorbing every word she can, but she can’t help the way her mind lopes back to the strange conversation between St. Claire and Governor Turner. About the way they spoke of captaincy, and about - -

The boat lurches, again and again, and Beth bobs in her barrel, chest tightening to an almost painful degree when she hears a voice say:

“We good?”

And it’s _him_ , knows it’s him, hears it in his drawl, and Beth swallows, digs her nails into her bag, holds it steady, as she feels the rest of the men clamber aboard when Stanley hums in affirmation.

“Well, take us out then,” he says over the thrum of the rain, and she feels it as much as she hears it, the water lolling beneath them, pushed below by the oars, and they’re going, they’re going, they’re going. 

*

But not for long.

She tries to map the direction of the jolly boat in her head, to feel each curve and turn, every momentous heave against the tumultuous sea, but it proves an impossible task, and instead Beth just lets the men take her where they will, blood thrumming hot in her veins, a damp sweat pearling beneath the neck of her gown. It’s the anticipation that she can’t quite swallow, that wedges in her throat like a poisoned apple, and she holds her bag a little closer to her chest and thinks of her children.

Eventually they dock and the jolly boat is roped up, levered up onto what Beth can only imagine is the ship, and then she is transported once again across a deck and down to what the scents and sounds promise her is a galley – the heady smell of rum briefly giving way to the scent of spice and broiled pork. Beth lets herself inhale deeply. Lets herself take the moment and wear it before she re-alerts herself to the sounds of the men joking, then one – Stanley, she thinks – bounding cross the floor, talking brightly to - -

To a woman?

Beth blinks, uncertain, but a tension in her shifts when she hears her speak again and knows that it is a woman. Almost unwinds entirely when she hears the woman laugh, hears Stanley laugh too, the sound growing muffled briefly in a way that makes Beth think perhaps they are embracing or kissing or both, and she leans sideways. Presses her ear to the side of the barrel, latching onto the sound of them – the warmth of their voices – before he steps away. Says something about getting the next load, and then all the men are gone.

Then it’s just Beth and the woman, who hums out some easy song as she moves. The sound of something being lifted, dropped, unpacked finding Beth’s ears. A quiet sort of domesticity.

With a frown, Beth sinks back down into the barrel, her legs cramping with the movement. The barrel really isn’t very big – between all her skirts, her body, and the meagre belongings she’d smuggled in with her, she finds her knees nearly at her shoulders, her back arched inelegantly. She thinks she might be half-drunk off the rum fumes too, a cloudiness to her head that leaves her bone tired.

Beyond the barrel, something sizzles, and then feet leap heavily onto the floor, and the woman says: “You should be helping the others,” with an exasperated voice, and it’s the boy Beth had followed – Eddie – his drawl so familiar, who replies: “I’ve done my bit, Mrs. Hill.”

It’s enough to make Beth huff in commiseration with this Mrs. Hill, briefly reminded of Kenny (and _oh_ , how the thought twists in her), and she’s still contemplating the thought when she feels her barrel suddenly heave upon it’s side. She flails. Gripping the walls of the thing to hold herself steady, heart thrumming anew as her spirit springs to life in her.

She takes in a shuddering breath, blinking rapidly when she feels the man tap at the base, locating a spot to sink the spigot to attempt to fill his cup. Beth pulls her legs up as best she can, away from the whole as the man fits the tap, talking absently to the woman before turning the thing and readying it to pour.

It takes a moment.

For him to know.

A moment until he grunts, confused, fiddling with the spigot, the sound echoing up the walls of the barrel, and Beth can’t blink, her eyes wide. She fumbles down, clutching, clasping at the knife, at her bag, sucks in wet breath after wet breath, and when no liquid gushes, Eddie cusses, ignoring Mrs. Hill’s dry quip of _this is what you deserve for not helping the others._ Beth hears the boys hands rummage up the side, slapping it, like something might just be stuck, trying to leverage it up a little as he tries the spigot again, and finally, when that doesn’t work, he stops.

Or at least, he stops _that_.

Suddenly there’s the squeal of a rubber cork, and Beth blinks up in time to see light start to peel in around the barrel’s previously stoppered bung hole, and then - -

A stream of it.

Gold gaslight glaring in, and Beth shields her face, eyes not quite ready to adjust after so long in the darkness of the barrel, and then she doesn’t have to – for an eye presses against the hole, covering it.

He yelps loudly, staggering back, and then surging forwards again to look, and Beth’s blood is thundering, and she hears Mrs. Hill’s voice again:

“The captain won’t be happy if St. Claire sold us a bad batch,” she says with a groan, but Eddie doesn’t entertain that.

“Nah, there’s a girl in there!”

Beth blinks rapidly, scrambling again for the knife, readying herself when another eye peers through the bung hole – a different man’s this time. Stanley’s perhaps? When had he gotten back here? – and there is no warmth in his voice when he turns to Eddie beyond the barrel and says:

“Get the captain.”

*

The head of the barrel whines as the blade is leveraged beneath it, warm light starting to filter in through the crack, and Beth’s heart thrums in her throat. Her stockinged feet scramble against the sticky wood beneath her, and she sucks in a hot, thick breath; adjusts her grip on the blade, feels the metal handle – clammy now with her touch – and finally steels herself.

Because it’s been a wait.

That’s all.

After the boy had discovered her, he’d disappeared. Left Beth to the careful quiet of the kitchen, the only true sound that of the other woman’s hushed, bitten whispers, _you can’t just leave her in there, at least crack the top so she can breathe, what if she’s hurt, why would she even be in there,_ and Beth had knocked her head back into the side of the barrel, asking herself the same question.

(Only no, she knew why. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw her children. Every time her mind drifted, she saw Annie. Saw the quiet determination on her sister’s tear-streaked face and god, Beth just has to _do this_ for her. Has to make this _work_ ).

He’d come back though eventually, the boy, with the direction to bring Beth down to the gundeck. The words had been enough to still her heart in her chest, to leave it heaving after in an agonising bid to catch up to itself again. Enough to leave her holding the knife so hard the embossed handle cut into her palms, enough her flushed throat bobbed, her feet scrambled, catching splinters in the base of the barrel. They’d heaved her up then, carrying her – barrel and all – towards the gundeck, a place Beth could only know as _down_ given the way they’d moved her, finally settling her in a loud, creaking room, the weather howling somewhere close, the sounds of the waves once again crashing against the beaten drums of her ears.

And then, still, or perhaps again.

She’d waited.

She’d tried to train her senses to orient herself again too, but most were useless– all she could smell or taste was the potent scent of the wasting rum, all she could see the black interior of the barrel, the bung hole re-plugged. All she could hear beyond the storm outside the drip of the men’s rain-wet coats on the wooden floors. The heavy stride to their heavy feet.

Beth had felt almost feverish with her own worry, nauseous with the stench of liquor perfuming her skin, with the anticipation, with this long, relentless _wait._

But that was over now, she thinks, blinking wildly, steeling herself for this moment. For the sight of a gundeck, of these men, perhaps - - just perhaps - - of _him_. Dim gaslight seeps into her line of vision as the head of the barrel is levered off, but Beth barely notices. Instead, her lungs sing with the pour of the fresh air, and she sucks sharply – the cool, untarnished breaths like a balm to the very bones of her – so fixed on it, that it takes her a moment too to notice a shadow coming to cover her.

“Don’t remember askin’ St. Claire to pack you.”

The voice drips like honey; the deep, casual confidence of it like a pipe to her eager ears, and Beth inhales all over again, letting her eyes fix and it’s _him_ , of course it’s him, some cocktail of relief and fear and adrenaline stirring in the very depths of her, and for a moment, Beth just lets herself see him. Take in his tanned skin and thick eyelashes, pearled with rainwater, his deep, dark eyes fixed down on her. His shirt is wet – clinging to his chest, and it somehow only makes the hard, sharp lines of him all the starker, makes the bird at his neck soar, and something warm burns in Beth again, a candle flickering behind each cheek.

Before she can even think – her head must still be foggy from the rum fumes – Beth leans up towards him, moving to stand, only to feel a sharp point at her chest dig. Glancing down, she stills at the sight that greets her.

The tip of a cutlass presses against her breast.

With a gasp, Beth sinks back down into the barrel, her grip scrambling to re-firm on the knife as her gaze follows the line of the cutlass to where it’s held loose within the stranger’s hand. She jerks her head back up to face him, taking in his lazy smile, and it’s red hot – the way her spirit surges up from where it’s been resting low in the depths of her – scrapping up any semblance of dignity. Of _station_.

“Do not point that thing at me,” Beth bites, and the stranger - - _Captain_ \- - just pops an eyebrow, doing nothing to move his sword.

“Yeah, you ain’t exactly in a position to be making orders, darlin’,” he hums, and somewhere behind him, the sound of laughter ricochets over the rain. It’s enough to make Beth flush bright – the reminder that they are not in this room alone leaving her mouth dry, her entire line of vision contained to the neat circle at the top of the barrel, the one the Captain positions himself in – and she stares back, briefly mute as her spirit wavers.

Her toes curl.

Sweat pearls at her brow. Dampens her hair, and she just - - she remembers what St. Claire had said to her, remembers the man at the harbour’s hand on her, and Beth’s breath stutters.

Above her, the Captain’s gaze doesn’t falter, but perhaps - -

Perhaps it _shifts_ , like he’s seen something in her look, for suddenly he works his jaw and then, just as suddenly, steps back from the barrel all together, removing the sword from her chest in the process.

A desperate exhale slips from Beth’s lips – a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding – and for a second, all she can do is listen as the Captain strides away from her. He says something loud to one of the men – something about _heave to_ – and Beth knows they’re all murmuring about her, but she can’t quite bring herself to listen as she focuses instead on leveraging up to stand.

Having been crammed so long in the barrel, her body is stiff and sore. Her throbbing ankle purple even beneath the fair colour of her stocking, and Beth awkwardly grips the side of the barrel, heaving herself up. She ignores the pain, the pins and needles, trying desperately to clutch still at her bag, her shoes, the knife, to keep herself together. A frantic, useless task. 

She pulls up enough to peek over the edge, and it’s strange, she thinks, heart pounding, for there are not as many men as she expected. The boy from earlier, still in Lady Karen’s husband’s hat, a Black man in a good suit, the man from her house with Noah’s ring, and then another, whom the Captain is speaking to in a low voice down the long passage of the gundeck.

And oh, the gundeck.

Beth blinks, taking it in as quickly as she can.

She hadn’t been sure what to expect. Had heard only stories, but the space itself is simpler than what she’d expected.

Long, clean wood floors leaning into long, clean wood walls populated with a series of small, open windows, rain trickling through. The nozzles of cannons sticking out of each while the heavy trunks of the artillery sit instead on the floor inside. Beth blinks, looking sideways past the men to where shelves upon shelves sit with severe-looking cannonballs, gunpowder nowhere to be seen. She swallows thickly, and before she can think of much else, the Captain nods at the man he’s speaking with, passes him his cutlass, before turning back to Beth.

A look crosses his face that Beth can’t read – almost - - almost like he’s impressed she’d moved at all – and it only serves to make her stand up taller, straightening her stiff legs, to point up her chin. It’s an instinct more than anything, and her pulse leaps, erratic, when the Captain suddenly starts to stride across the gundeck towards her. The potent smell of rum rises up from her dress, heady enough she almost feels drunk off it as he closes the distance between them again, an intent to his long stride that makes her breath catch. She swallows again to cover it, wishing she’d managed to get her shoes back on, so she might at least be eye level with something other than the man’s wet chest. Her fingers flex awkwardly where they’re hooked in the heels of them, her bag pulled to her chest. 

He doesn’t stop until he’s practically pressed into the other side of the barrel, and her grip grows white knuckled, despite herself. His gaze darts down, catches it, before he pulls his focus back to meet hers, and god, she has to crane her neck to meet his look. She stands up a little taller, squares her shoulders, her jaw, and if she didn’t know any better, she’d swear his lip twitches into something approaching a _grin_.

After a moment, he holds his hands in front of himself, rolls his shoulders back, tilts his head as he levels a look at the knife still in her hands.

“You wanna put yours away too?”

With a blink, Beth takes him in, then the knife, then the men who stand behind him, watching with interest, and Beth sets her jaw.

“No.”

The word is enough to make him grin, something dart quick and open, before he pulls his expression in again.

“Okay,” he says, and it’s almost gentle, the way that he says it. “Wanna tell me why you’re in this barrel?”

Somewhere above them, a man yells. Something guttural over the course of the weather, over the violent tumult of the sea, and Beth’s focus splits. Sees the split on the other men too, the way their eyes leap from her to the ladder not far from them, but the Captain’s never does. He stays looking at her, like he hears no sound except her caught breath, her rabid heart, and when she looks at him again, she feels her spirit twitch.

“I needed to get on your ship,” she tells him, because it has all she’s thought since he left her, and the Captain rocks his head from side-to-side, turning over her words in his head, before he says:

“Yeah? Didn’t wanna ask?”

“You’d have said no.”

He makes a humming noise of agreement, gaze lazily fixed down on her, before he drawls a casual:

“Ain’t really in the business of givin’ ladies safe passage.”

And what’s that supposed to mean, Beth wonders. Does he mean he offers no safety? Or no ladies? But - - no.

There was the woman in the galley. Laughing with a lover.

There was _him_ , in her treasury.

_Yeah, that ain’t somethin’ you gotta worry about with me._

Beth can only stare at him, awkwardly holding her bag to her soaked chest as she leans backwards, hard enough her lower back collides again with the outer rim of the barrel behind her, and vaguely Beth sees Eddie swing across to the man with Lord Huntington’s ring, whispering something to him, and Beth shifts her gaze back to Rio.

 _No passage_ , she thinks. That’s what he meant.

She scowls, something in her sparking hot at his assumption.

“If I simply wanted safe passage, your ship would be the last place I’d seek it,” she sniffs, and the Captain pops an eyebrow down at her, lip twitching in amusement, but she can see it still – the brief glimmer of insult, which wasn’t entirely what she’d meant, but before she can elaborate, he cuts in. 

“Maybe,” he offers. “But I ain’t exactly sure what else you could afford, what with that empty treasury of yours.”

The words do what he must’ve known they would, fanning a flame in her, and Beth flushes furiously, glaring up at him. From the look on his face, he simply seems to delight in her reaction, his lips splitting into a smirk, and - - and _no_ , Beth thinks. They are getting off track. Insults will get her nowhere. She needs him to hear her offer. To take it. She shifts her feet on the floor of the dirty barrel underneath her, wincing when pain sings in her ankle, clutching at her bag, her shoes, her knife, but still.

She stands as regally as possible.

“I am here requesting employment.”

And at least that seems to surprise him.

His other eyebrow darts up to meet his first.

“Excuse me?”

“I would like a job,” she says. “I believe I can be very valuable to you.”

The quiet briefly pulses in the mere inches between them, like a living thing caught in a trap, and the Captain, he just - - _stares_ at her, his eyes big and dark, his lashes threaded still with rainwater and he blinks.

Then he blinks again. Gaze darting down to her heaving chest, the knife in her hands, the wet, stinking skirts of her dress.

Then he turns back to the men behind him.

“Eddie, prepare the jolly boat. Stanley, you gonna be okay to take Lady Boland back to her lord husband?”

Which - -

 _No_.

Beth’s breath hitches as she springs forwards, barely thinking as her toes stump against the other side of the barrel, back to being within a hairs breadth of him as the men nod behind the Captain. Without a thought, Beth tosses her shoes aside, her bag, frees her hands of all but the knife to grab at his arm.

“What? _No_ ,” she insists, her knee hitting the side of the barrel hard enough to bruise, and god, her hands feel desperate, and she blinks and sees Emma with a bouquet of orange blossom. Jane with a ring she can’t stand. Feels in every inch of her what that _means._ Her hands grow more desperate, cling harder, and the Captain turns back to stare at her, a look of disbelief on his face as he glances down at her hand on his arm. She infuses as much earnestness as she can into her words: “You are not hearing me. I will earn my keep.”

“Oh, you will, huh? And how you gonna do that?”

There’s a tone to his voice that makes one of the men snort behind him, but Beth can’t hear it. Can’t hear anything except the Captain. Can’t see anything now along the gundeck that isn’t him, and she needs him to understand. Needs him to see all that she can offer, because she has so much to, knows that she does. Knows she can be good and useful and she can salvage each and every one of her most treasured people’s futures.

“By being a lady,” she insists, and when the Captain rolls his eyes, Beth frowns, tightens her grip on his arm, feeling the damp of his shirt, the firmness of his arm beneath, and something in it shoots hot through her. “I am one of great social standing, and I have much to offer your band of - - ”

Her gaze flits, Eddie to Stanley to the man with the ring. She remembers the twitch of Rio’s lip at her insult before. Sees it starting again now, in preparation of another.

“Very reputable sailors,” she says quickly instead, and the Captain barks on a laugh. “I have a good name. I know everyone, and who of them has valuable things for your - - ” she scrambles for the word. “ _Thieving_. I can pass through the town’s unnoticed, as a sort of scout perhaps, I - -”

“Tell St. Claire she better replace the rum too,” the Captain tells his boys, easily tugging his arm free of Beth’s grip. “I ain’t paid her for trouble.”

“Listen to me,” Beth insists again, scrambling now, trying to catch him once more, pulling at the arm of his shirt as he turns from her. “I need you to listen to me - - I can - - I will - -”

And he turns back towards her then, his face harder than she’s seen it before, his words drawled out but somehow still with an undercurrent _tightness_ that makes Beth pause.

“When you take her to her lord husband, see if there’s anythin’ worthwhile left at the house,” he says, gaze still on Beth as her mouth dries. “Make sure he pays for the time his little lady wife here has lost us.”

Outside, the waves crash heavily, headily into the side of the ship, the sound a heady, too-close roar, and Beth stares at him. At his newly closed look, and her hands shake as she remembers herself, remembers the pearls in her dress pocket, and she tugs them out quickly, offering them.

“Collateral - - until I can show you my worth,” she says, but he pays them no mind, staring back at his boys.

“And make sure she doesn’t follow you back.”

The roar of the ocean isn’t just too-close, it’s too _loud_ , Beth thinks, panting suddenly, her spirit rising up in the twisted, aching bones of her, watching the back of his head. He says something else to one of his boys, but Beth doesn’t hear it. She blinks and she sees him, she blinks and she sees her children. Annie. Benjamin. Sees all of this night flick by her like the pages of a book she knows too well, and not well enough, and he _saw_ her in the depths of Dean’s treasury.

He doesn’t get to unsee her now.

With the hand holding the pearls, Beth grabs the arm of his shirt again, pulling him towards her, and as the Captain spins, she raises her other hand with the knife to his throat. He reels, staring at her, and Beth just stares unblinking back, feeling his adam’s apple bob against her blade.

“You’d be a fool to take me back,” she tells him. “The harbour will be crawling with officers by now.”

Vaguely, she’s aware of the men springing into action behind them, but the Captain just holds up his free hand, leaving his other arm in Beth’s grip, his neck against her knife, and something in Beth bounds with adrenaline. She shifts a little, firms her hold.

“Not until morning,” Rio says, voice unbothered. “We left a little surprise in town. They’ll think we’re still there.”

And Beth just shrugs, matching his tone even as her heart pounds heavy in her chest.

“Governor Turner thinks you kidnapped me,” she tells him, and that gets his attention, his gaze snapping to her with a jerk of his neck, his expression veering from shock to anger too quickly. She tightens her grip on the knife, and she remembers St. Claire, speaking not to her, but to Eddie. To Turner. Remembers the firmness of her tone, and she wonders if she felt in that moment what Beth feels now. She wets her lips. “He was already at the harbour before you left. Interrogated your woman on the ground. If you don’t think he’ll have summoned his _best_ men to the docks, you’re out of your mind. People notice. When pirates steal ladies.”

Their eyes meet over her knife at his throat, and the Captain blinks slowly, languidly down at her, but there’s a tension to his face that sets her nerves on edge. That tells her he doesn’t like this (maybe), but that he won’t be the one to break their line of sight. Beth thrums wild with energy, her pearls still tangled in the hand clutching at his shirt, and it’s okay, she thinks, if he doesn’t like this, because it doesn’t matter. She _needs_ this.

She has no other option.

“You will employ me,” she tells him. “And you will pay me what I earn. If you take me back, I will not go quietly. Everyone will know where you hid at harbour. How you replenished. Where you docked your ship. Word will travel straight to the Governor’s ear, and he _will_ find you, because I will tell him _everything_.”

And it’s a bluff, surely he must know it – she had barely been able to keep her head straight on the trip from harbour to ship, much less know where they were anchored – but still, the Captain’s nostrils flare. His gaze skirts across her face, like he’s trying to work out the lie, and Beth says nothing, just stares right back, blood thrumming, until - - until suddenly he pulls away.

The movement is with such force that Beth is yanked forwards into the side of the barrel, almost toppling the thing over, and before she can so much as steady herself, he’s yanked the pearls free of her fingers, and then grabbed her other wrist, easily pulling the knife from her grip as well and shoving that into the back of his pants. Beth gasps, head reeling, and then - -

Then she’s being hauled _up_. The Captain’s shoulder leveraged just beneath her breasts as he leans forwards, pulling her up and out of the barrel. With a yelp, she scrambles, feet desperately seeking purchase, her arms flailing, legs kicking as he walks her a few steps forwards only to deposit her unceremoniously before Eddie.

Her rolled ankle gives instantly, but before she can collapse, the Captain grabs her arm like she’s a ragdoll, and slings it over Eddie’s shoulder, gesturing promptly for him to hold her up.

“Take her to my cabin,” he grunts. “She can stay there for now.”

The words are offered offhand, flippant almost, and Beth spins, chest heaving with something like relief, even as Stanley and the man with Lord Huntington’s ring share a long-suffering look behind her.

Beth blinks rapidly back at the Captain, but he doesn’t so much as look back at her. Rather, he just jerks his head, and moves forwards, the man with the ring following at a steady pace. They cross the gundeck, to the ladder, then they’re up, and they’re gone.

*

Still, the rain pours.

Perhaps oddly, it’s almost a relief this time, Beth thinks, as Eddie leads her up the ladder to the top deck of the ship, feeling it already start to wash away the heady scent of rum from her dress, her hair, her skin. To feel the wind sweep up the salt from the sea, sting at the cuts on her feet, blood congealed at her stockings, at her throbbing, swollen ankle, crystalise in her eyelashes.

It’s enough to make Beth suck in a breath, her gaze skirting through the night to where the men steer sails, capturing the gales to surge them forwards, waves breaking against the ship’s stem, coursing across the keel. Beth stumbles forwards, clutching at her reclaimed bag, her shoes, following Eddie out across the open deck, shivering as the cold air cups her cheeks and claws at her neck.

When they get across, Eddie pulls out a ring of keys and unlocks a cabin at the front of the ship, promptly stepping inside, out of the rain, before gesturing Beth in behind him. She does with a tentative step, watching as Eddie scratches a little at his face, throwing his free arm out to gesture broadly around the room.

“You can put your things over there,” he says, gesturing to a patch of wooden floor at the front of the cabin.

Beth limps forwards, placing her bag and her shoes where Eddie had directed before she lets herself take in the cabin properly. Let’s her gaze skirt over every elegant inch of it.

It’s larger than she expected – perhaps a little bigger than her ladies’ apartment at home – and seems to encompass many spaces. A small, round wood table with three chairs sits at the fore for meals, and behind it a larger, rectangular one that extends so many feet Beth thinks two of her could lay end-to-end and still not reach the edges. Atop it are a sprawl of paper, quills, ink pots. A topography of worlds – sea patterns, letters, maps and words – and Beth eyes it only briefly before letting her gaze travel beyond.

There’s a closet in the corner, then a copper bathtub, then – bolted to the wall of the cabin – one of the most beautiful beds Beth has ever seen. It stands enclosed in an intricately designed wooden frame, leaving only the one open side to slip in and out of. The bed itself is so inviting that Beth feels her body sag, having to shift her weight at the last moment to spare her ankle. It’s not just the bed, but the lush pillows, the deep red blankets, the clean look of the thing that leaves something in her turning.

Beth glances back at Eddie, who lingers still in the doorway of the cabin.

“Are all of the rooms so nice?” Beth asks him lightly, and Eddie wrinkles his nose in reply.

“Nah,” he says, flushing just a little. “All the men share, but we keep it clean, miss. Rio likes us to keep the whole ship clean.”

 _Rio_.

Is that his name?

She’s heard it before, and it takes her a minute to place it. To remember it on St. Claire’s tongue when she’d spoken to Eddie, and she’d used it in the same way she’d said _captain._ Beth blinks, her mouth suddenly dry in a way she can’t explain, and she lets her eyes fall on Eddie again in distraction, huffing out a laugh.

“That hat belonged to the husband of a friend of mine,” she says, and Eddie looks back at her, his eyes wide.

“Sorry,” he replies, offhand and without meaning it, and Beth shrugs back.

She feels so incredibly tired all of a sudden, and it’s like he sees it, because abruptly Eddie rocks a little on his feet.

“You can clean up over there,” he tells her, gesturing to the copper tub in the corner. “I’ve got to get back out to help the others.”

Despite the sentiment of instruction, he still waits for her dismissal – much like Darren would back at the Boland estate – and the familiarity of it is too welcome to Beth’s tired head. She offers him a small and gracious nod, and the second he slips out, Beth sinks back against the wall of the cabin, shuddering in a breath.

She's here.

She's aboard, with the promise of work – the details to be worked out later – but still. The knowledge that she had succeeded left her mind triumphant, but her body still too weary. Her spirit yawning as it put out the fire in her, ready for sleep, and it was enough to propel Beth into a new sort of action. Without any further fanfare, she slowly limped her way to the tub.

Alone here, it’s like she can finally see herself – _feel_ herself – and she takes in the heavy, soaked weight of her dress, her petticoats, the mud caked into the hem from the harbour and the sediment from the rum barrel staining her stockings. The salt that had whipped from the sea and made a nest of her hair. Beth had brought no clothes with her, nothing to redress herself in, and the thought that the Captain might return at any moment to finish their conversation leaves her no space to think of undressing to sleep. She stands over the tub instead, rings out her hair, brushes back through it with her fingers before braiding it loosely, clearing it from her face. She works on wringing out her dress, tugging off her torn stockings and cleaning her bloodied feet, pulling splinters from the arches.

Just briefly, she prods at her ankle, wincing when the pain spikes up through it, and it’s only then that she takes a shuddering breath.

In the moment of it all, she feels oddly warm. A little hot to the touch, and she searches the cabin for a source. When she finds none, her weary eyes fix instead on a bottle of bourbon, left lying down on the long table, and Beth goes to collect it. Using it first to clean her bloodied feet, her scrapes, and then to wet her tongue, throat, belly, sucking in a breath and trying not to laugh at the image of herself.

If only Annie could see her.

She’ll have to write and tell her, she thinks, a grin tugging at the corner of her lips, imagining her sister’s disbelieving look when she reads Beth held a knife to a pirate captain’s throat.

The thought is even enough to make Beth giggle, taking another ladylike sip from the bottle of bourbon, spinning out in her wet dress as she dances around her new room. No man can take a thing from her, she thinks headily, not anymore. Not from her children. She is her own woman, like something from a fairy tale. Beth Marks, the Sailing Lady.

She finds herself back at the long table, looking out across the expanse of maps, and too quickly she finds her gaze traipsing across continents, taking in the lines of this world – voyages she never knew she could take – and she blinks rapidly, a bubble of warmth forming in her chest, bursting behind her eyes at just the sheer _possibility_ of it and - - not yet, Beth thinks.

Gaze refocusing.

Where’s their next stop?

Where can Beth get to land to send a letter to Annie?

She scans it all, her hand dropping the bourbon bottle to the table and her fingers briefly moving to brush up the backside of a feathered quill instead, when the cabin door clicks open, and the Captain slips inside.

Beth doesn’t need to look to know it. Doesn’t need to pull her gaze away from the sprawling paper world before her, the lines of his chartering, his voyages and his history laid bare before her. Can feel his presence like the turn of a season. The air loses its chill, the icy floorboards beneath her still-damp toes warm, as if spring has found this cabin and chased away the winter.

So no, she does not need to look, but still, with the finest hairs on the back of her neck rising - -

She looks.

He has not closed the distance between them, will not, she suspects, pressing his back to the door behind him, one of his arms folded at a loose angle behind his back, his other dropped by his side. His shoulders are curved forwards ever so slightly, something she perhaps would not even see if it weren’t for the gold chain around his neck dangling off his chest, the cross at the end of it swaying in the air, and she can’t quite explain it. The urge to clasp it in her fist, just like - - she swallows. Gaze darting down to where her pearls are wrapped up still in his fingers, crossed around each one like a set of rings.

Beyond him, the deck is alive with chatter. With the haul of men, as they steer the ship windward, pulling them out and further away from the harbor, and Beth’s heart flutters at the thought, because the reality hits her. It means - - it means this is _real_. That her sister, her children, are left upon the shore behind her, that her grace and her station shall wither there unnurtured.

It must cross her features, the thought of it all, for the captain tilts his head, his dark eyes taking her in as her own hand flattens against the long table, gripping a little as the ship starts to slowly tug forwards, but he does not seek to comfort her.

Nor should he, Beth reminds herself, wetting her lips, the hand not clutching the table coming to her breast, feeling the tightness of her chest beneath the weight of her soaked dress, smelling nought but the stench of rum again, still glommed upon her skin. She needs the distraction, needs something to re-ground her, and her gaze darts back up to the Captain in time to see his gaze fixed on the hand at her breast, and she quickly drops it, ignoring her quickening heart when his eyebrows raise just slightly, gaze darting up to her face, a smile twitching at his full lips.

She feels the heat in her cheeks, blossoming like it really is spring, and she clears her throat, desperate, suddenly, to refocus.

“Rio.”

She says it tentatively, and perhaps this was not the right course of action, for the word sits like a molasses pull in her mouth, tastes too sweet when held between her teeth.

“Is that your name?”

It’s the one young Eddie and St. Claire had both called him after all, and Beth can only watch as his twitching lips sprawl into a wide and proper smile, his eyes so bright they spark like precious stones.

“One of them,” he drawls, voice like the molasses she tasted when she spoke his name.

Beth blinks, hand moving to smooth at her waist, feel the twitch of her body beneath, and it is the cold, she tells herself, but - - she doesn’t feel so cold anymore.

“I should call you something more proper,” she tells him, praying to someone above that perhaps he might have a harsher family name, a Bert or Edgar or something that might leave granules in the smoothness of him, and it’s like he’s read her mind, because suddenly he laughs, the noise low and warm.

“Darlin’, you can call me whatever you want.”

For a moment, Beth just stares at him. Watches him slowly push off the wall, untangling her pearls to place them on the small table at the front of the room. He pulls off his own gold chain there too, dropping it to entangle with her pearls, and Beth blinks. Heart pounding in her chest.

“I won’t apologise,” she says quickly, before she can think anymore of it. “For holding a knife to you. You weren’t listening to me.”

Rio just shrugs, unbothered as he steps slowly into the room, and Beth swallows when he says: 

“Okay.”

“And I don’t expect you to either for holding your cutlass to me,” she adds. “I think we should start anew. Discuss our arrangement.”

He tilts his head in acknowledgement this time, and Beth finds herself uncertain again. Her body singing awake – a chorus of frayed nerves and aches and weariness and gut – and she can only watch nervously as Rio takes another step closer. The scent of ink and paper finds her nose, and Beth twists on the spot, ignoring the cry at her ankle, and instead re-fixing her attention on the map. _This is important_ , Beth reminds herself. Good.

Because Rio is giving her too little. Nothing to work off, and - - god, she just wants to go to bed.

Wishes he would leave. Allow them to talk about this in the full light.

“You’ll need to show me where we are to dock,” Beth tells the map. “I need to let my sister know where to send letters, and how regularly she can expect them in return. I hope we will be stopping at least every two weeks. More even, if we can.”

 _Two weeks_.

It feels reasonable in her gut, but unreasonable to her heart. _Each day,_ it begs her. When was the last time she went two weeks without speaking to her sister? Has she ever gone two weeks without hearing her children’s voices? She sniffs, wets her lips, that bubble bursting behind her eye again, throbbing in her head.

 _No,_ she cannot weep yet.

“You will need to tell me what I can earn,” she adds. “I will expect something decent for my time. Something reflective of my station.”

She needs it, after all.

To secure her children’s futures.

It takes her a moment to realise that Rio hasn’t replied, and when she does, she glances up to see he’s moved away from her. Is instead toying with something on the bookshelf near the cabin door – a chunk of wood half-fashioned into a toy ship. She blinks, surprised a little by it. It looks like one Kenny and Danny might have played with when they were younger, and it gives her pause briefly, unsettles her almost and she’s not sure why, and it’s like he’s felt her gaze on him, for he drops it, and turns around to face her.

He wets his lips, and Beth fixates, and then - -

Beth blinks, coughs a little, spins back to the maps, an awkward feeling uncurling in her as she says:

“It isn’t appropriate too, for you to enter my cabin without knocking.”

“I’m sorry, _your_ cabin?”

And fine, Beth thinks, huffing out a breath, rolling her eyes in the process as her hands rest upon the long table.

“I am aware it is only a loan,” she tells him dryly, for she _is_. Knows that the gentlemanly nature of this act cannot go ignored, but it is just that – gentlemanly. Giving up his cabin for her. She blinks and she sees him in the treasury.

 _Yeah, you ain’t gotta worry about that with me_.

Something stutters in her chest, because - - because - -

She remembers Dean.

Sidling up behind her in their bed, stinking of another woman.

She swallows.

Shakes her head.

Grips the edge of the table a little firmer.

“Oh, I think you’ve misread the situation, sweetheart.”

Which - - _what?_

Beth blinks, spinning on the spot to see Rio staring at her across the cabin, his gaze fixed on her, waiting for her to meet his eye, and when she does, he shakes his head.

“Yeah, see, this is _my_ cabin. I’m lettin’ you stay here with me because there ain’t anywhere else for you to go. That’s all.”

The words ring too loud in Beth’s head – echoing through the cavern of her tired skull, and she just stares at him briefly, her eyes wide, her breath caught, her wet and heavy dress weighing her down, and she thinks - - she doesn’t know what she thinks, her mouth spluttering, her chest tightening, because _no._ Because she is a lady. She is married, she is not to lie beside those she is not bound to and, regardless, -- 

“Where do you intend me to sleep?” she bites, gaze tearing around the room before she gestures to the lone bed, bolted to the wall. “There, or would you have me sleep on the floor?”

She intends it snidely, but perhaps it was the wrong thing to say for a filthy look crosses his face, something that lights something hot and low in her in a way that has her groping for the table behind her and she glowers at him, as he takes her in.

“It gets cold out on these seas, darlin’,” he drawls. “Figured we could play nice, yeah? Cosy up all proper-like.”

His voice is little more than a dulcet purr and Beth just feels - - feels too _hot_ , that sparking heat tearing up through her veins, and before she can think anymore of it, she closes the distance between them, pushing at his arm like she did before, only this time attempting to push him _out_. To get him away from her (because god, it’s too _much_ , and she is so _tired_ ) and out of the cabin, but Rio promptly pivots, twisting easily in her grip and instead grabbing her wrist.

The warmth of his hand is enough to sear her skin, and she yelps, staggering back, her ankle twisting painfully.

“Let go of me,” she snaps, flushed with anger, and she tears at her wrist, yanking it back as Rio huffs out a breath, all playfulness giving way to exasperation, and suddenly he releases her. The abruptness of the movement is enough to make her stumble back, still-bare feet scuffing on the cold wood floors, her ankle throbbing. Rio offers no gentlemanly aid, instead snorting out an unbecoming laugh and striding back across the room. He tugs off his greatcoat, draping it carefully over the side of the tub, so that the water that drips from it can rivulet down the copper, pooling in the base, and Beth inhales a wobbly breath.

“I’ll find somewhere else to sleep then,” she decides, and Rio just shakes his head, walking over to the closet and tugging open the door. He pulls out two towels, dropping one over his shoulder before turning back around to face her.

“There ain’t nowhere else,” he tells her, holding out the other towel, and Beth just stares at him. At _it_. The thought of pulling the towel around herself right now, drying off her rum-soaked, rain-soaked body like something out of a dream, but still - -

She digs in her heels.

She can’t take anything from him with her dignity at stake. 

“There’s another woman on board - -” she says promptly, remembering her voice, but Rio quickly interjects.

“Who sleeps in the only other closed cabin on this ship. With her husband. One that's barely bigger than that empty treasury of yours,” he says, and when Beth glowers at him, he rolls his eyes, dropping the towel to the table near to her as if she might take it were he not holding it. “Look, this ain’t exactly ideal for me neither, but these are your choices. Me and here, or down in the sleepout with fifty men and nothin’ to protect you.”

The words stopper something in Beth. Leave her briefly open-mouthed and wide eyed, because she can’t even imagine the alternative he’s offered her. She huffs, swallows, hears the yells of men outside and wobbles. After a moment, she stares back at him, eyeing him carefully.

“And I have something to protect me in here?” she asks, voice leaden with disbelief. “With you?”

For a moment, all Beth can hear is her own breaths and the _drip drip drip_ of Rio’s greatcoat in the copper tub. Her bare toes curled beneath her as Rio looks at her, considering, and then suddenly, like it’s nothing at all, he dips a hand into the back of his belt and pulls out the knife St. Claire had given her. He tosses it lightly – from handle to blade – and then finally offers it to her.

It’s enough to catch her breath, to make her gaze dart – from it to him to it to him, and that last time, he sighs. 

“If I was gonna try anything, you think I’d give that back?”

Beth blinks up at him, sees the tired lines of his face, and after a second, she darts forwards, grabbing the knife, and Rio lets her take it easily. An amused smile twitching at his lips when she clutches it to the belly of her dress, and then it’s just - - quiet again. Rio steps back towards his closet once more, unbuttoning his shirt, and when he goes to suddenly pull it over his head, Beth flushes furiously, spinning on the spot so that her back is to him, giving him the privacy.

Suddenly all she can hear is the violent throb of her heart in her chest, and she feels too hot again, her palms growing clammy around the handle of the knife, and she can’t speak. Her tongue feels too big. Her ankle throbs, her chest aches, and perhaps - - perhaps she can sleep in here. Just for the night, and in the morning, she can find a new place to lay.

Still, she cannot sleep in the bed.

Not if he intends to sleep there himself.

“I shall rest on the floor,” she says, and Rio doesn’t seem bothered, simply offering her an:

“Ai’ght,” before adding. “You can turn around now.”

Swallowing, Beth does, only to find Rio dry and redressed. Not in a nightshirt, like Dean, but in a clean pair of loose black slacks and a white shirt, open at the neck once again, allowing the bird to spring free. Beth blinks.

“You sleep in your daywear?”

Rio snorts.

“I usually sleep in nothin’. See? We both makin’ sacrifices.”

Beth blushes to the roots of her hair, and is relieved when Rio pulls one of the pillows off the bed, and then one of the thin blankets, and offers both to her. She takes them cautiously.

“Dry off first, yeah? Don’t need you gettin’ all this wet too.”

Beth nods, but there’s no real way for her to do it. Still, she watches as Rio slips into the bed, curling over blissfully away from her, and she doesn’t undress, but towels off as best she can, before laying on the hard wood floor. She shivers, sniffs, the weight of the day so heavy, it crushes her to sleep.

*

It’s the humming she hears first.

Some jaunty, childish tune, and Beth can’t quite hide her smile. Can’t swallow it down or conceal it, for she knows the voice – more than that, knows the person that voice belongs to – and she’s walking down the hallway of her house before she can think a thing of it. A spring to her step as she peers around the doorframe and spots her eldest son, sitting on the back step of the house, pulling on the laces of his polished brogues, tapping the toes of them together as he sings.

For a moment, she just watches him.

Watches the warm, summer sun pink his cheeks and bring out the bright, brass tones of his hair, and beyond him, she captures the glimmer off Emma’s brooch – some treasured thing Annie had gifted her for her last birthday – catching the light. There are grass stains on her dress already, which means she was, however briefly, able to forget her little lady sensibilities and lose herself to play, the thought a welcome one in Beth’s tired head.

Still, it will require the good soap Mrs. Wexler sells at the harbour markets, and - -

Beth pauses.

The harbour markets?

The thought of it sits strangely in her head. Or not strangely. _Uncomfortably_. Like a tiny stone caught in a shoe, and that’s ridiculous, Beth thinks. She loves the harbour markets. Has often felt her most at home there, and even now with just the thought, she can hear the crash of the waves.

And then - - louder.

Too loud.

Beth squirms backwards, mouth suddenly dry, or not dry. Wet. Her tongue aches, and she can taste pennies and did she bite her tongue?

She presses a hand to her mouth, but - - no. No blood.

“Shh,” a voice says, cutting through her thoughts. “We have you, you’re okay. Just let me - - Let me clean you up.”

It’s not a voice she recognises, not one at all, and Beth spins on the spot, eyes roaming over the hallway of her house and this furniture’s not her’s - - that tub is _copper_ , the floors are scratched, this is - -

“Are you okay, mommy?”

It’s Jane then, standing next to her, head tilted, her hair a mess, and Beth huffs, back to herself, back to her house. She shakes her own head, clearing her thoughts, smooths her hand down at the waist of her dress.

“I’m wonderful, my darling,” Beth says sweetly, watching Jane smile back at her, leaping a little on the spot. Her favourite, pink knit blanket is tangled up in her grip, and Beth’s smile only widens. “Have you seen your Aunty Annie?”

“She had to go and get a new vase.”

Which - - what?

Beth blinks.

“A new vase?”

“To replace grandma’s!” Jane says happily, and Beth stares at her daughter, the thought niggling, and she steps away from her only to twist her ankle. With a gasp, she collapses to the floor, spits blood from her mouth, blinks feverishly down on it and then - - there are adult hands on her, pulling her up. 

“ - - sleep on the floor. What is _wrong_ with you? Need I remind you, _Captain,_ you pulled her from that barrel yourself. She was soaked to the bone and probably half out of her wits already.”

There’s a hum above her, or - - not just above her, at her side too, like the sound has reverberated from chest to mouth. Like she’s _pressed_ to a chest, being lifted from the ground again. She blinks wildly, looking for Jane, but sees nothing. She tries to call her daughter’s name, but no words free from her mouth. 

“It’s no wonder she has a fever, and her ankle - - we need to bind it.”

“I _know_ ,” a voice grunts, and then the woman’s voice again, scoffing this time.

“If you _knew_ , you would’ve called me earlier. As soon as you’d gotten her here.”

“Watch it,” the man bites, tutting the _t_. “I’m still your captain, Hill.”

“The only captain you are is a captain of foolery,” the woman replies as the broad arms lower Beth to something so soft. “You should have sent her home. She doesn’t belong here. There are bruises on her arm too. I saw them when I changed her. Look, I’ll - -”

Vaguely, Beth’s aware of her arm being moved, and she cries out, pulling herself in protectively, and then she’s being shushed, and vaguely she feels a big hand on her forehead, cool knuckles softly grazing her there, the touch something like a relief, and she leans into it even as she hears a muffled curse above her.

“She’s burnin’ up again.”

And the sun is warm here, she thinks, lifting a hand to shield her vision, watching her children play in the garden. It’s Danny and Benjamin who waves across the yard, bright eyed, their blond hair matching in a way that delights her.

“When did you get home?” a voice says, and Beth turns to see Annie walking down the hallway behind her, a bright grin on her face.

“I don’t remember,” Beth replies dreamily, holding her arm out for her sister to press sweetly into her side, and everything feels so good, she thinks, even with the summer heat searing through her.

Perhaps she will make a cake tonight, she thinks, as the weather turns, and something cool and wet is pressed to her forehead.

Something that will make her children smile.

**Author's Note:**

> (Don't worry - Ruby and Stan are definitely main characters. As you probably picked up - they're aboard a certain ship ;-) )


End file.
